From Georg Christoph Lichtenberg’s The Waste Books. English translation by R.J. Hollingdale. NYRB.
Tag: Bad Writing
Scary Stories–Halloween Edition, 2007
…in which I take a critical look at some of my 11th grader’s scary stories.
(Check out last year’s batch, if you like).
Rotting Jack O’ Lanterns w/ Flies (2007)
Felici@ Noll*y’s “Eyes of a Baby” makes stunning use of what I like to call “the fetal voice.” Noll*y’s narrative begins in a “bubble […] so safe and warm with extra soft walls.” However, her hapless narrator is soon confronted with “monsters” who “torture” the poor kid, ripping it out of its safe haven, depriving it of its immediate source of food. The poor dear ends up in a “jail cell with big bars,” contemplating a strange new existence in a world populated by demons. Noll*y’s narrative captures the jarring dissonance of new beginnings contrasted with the ever-present ideal of a perfect, unattainable “safe haven.”
L@ur@ Cunningh@m submitted a trio of vignettes, each as unfinished as a fetus, each showing some serious promise as contenders in an Anne Rice parody contest–only I think Cunningh@m’s serious about her work. In “Implied Consent,” she dips into her idea of an adult vampire world, one reminiscent of the early nineties goth scene. She also uses the phrase “nary a word.” Yes, “nary.” Ugh. In “Duality,” she takes a stab at a postmodern trope–the characters in the story are being written into existence by other characters in the story (somebody get Charlie Kaufman on the phone). In the blandly-titled “Something,” Cunningh@m demonstrates public high school’s complete failure to teach human anatomy with this clunker: “Hot bile rose to the back of her throat.” Bile is produced by the liver, sweetheart. Maybe it’s just a very, very complicated metaphor.
Sh@t@vi@ E@dy’s “Down in the Crowd,” written as a screenplay, finds rumors to be the root of all evil. I’m not sure exactly what happened in E@dy’s tale, but I do know that gossip and misinformation are sites of extreme horror for her. Also, there’s a predominate preoccupation with “the cool kids” and the “not cool kids”–social scientists are now clamoring to adopt these specialized terms as their own.
M@tik@ Bl@l@rk’s “Taken” begins in media res, a bold step that none of the other young writers attempted. Good for her! Unfortunately, Bl@l@rk’s cluttered imagery and frantic pace leave no room for the reader to have any sense of what’s going on. In the end, she pulls what is to be a recurring motif in many of these stories: “It was all just a dream” (alternately: “It was all just a nightmare”). So says I: “It was all just a cop out.” People didn’t like that shit on Dallas back in the 1980s, and I don’t like it now.
Far more ambitious is Ch@ntel R**d*r’s “Fight of the Gods,” written entirely in a marvelous backwoods dialect (at one point, her narrator points out that the “man war havin’ a Caesar,”–he means “seizure”–a line compounded in semiotic resonance when one considers the fact that Caesar suffered from epileptic fits. I applaud R**d*r’s Joycean wordplay!) After thirty-five pages, it became clear that R**d*r had submitted not a self-contained story, but the initial chapter of a book about demonic possession over the ages of man. She says she has more, and I’d love to read it.
Mel@nie River@’s “Breathe,” like a number of the stories this year, seems to take several of its cues from the recent Saw franchise: torture chambers as puzzles, ambitious killers, that sort of thing. River@’s story stands out on several counts, beginning with her adventurous use of verbs: in “Breathe,” we find that bones can be “emasculated” (these are not metaphorical bones; she is referring to ulnas and tibias and metatarsils and shit like that). There is a fascinating episode where a bus driver bites a hapless victim, who astoundingly replies: “Who are you to put your hands on someone else’s child, huh?!” I was astounded because that’s just what I say when a weirdo stranger bites me unprovoked out of nowhere. It turns out that the bus driver is a killer, and not just “a normal killer, he was an advanced killer.” Coming soon to a theater near you: Advanced Killers 4: The Matriculation.
As its title suggests, D@nchelle Jon*s’s “Scary Story” is a self-reflexive postmodern comment that seeks to pull at the very roots of just what can qualify as a “scary story,” or for that matter, as a story at all! Who says you have to have mood, tone, or setting? What traditionalists (patriarchalists, no doubt!) decree that a story should have a beginning, middle and end? Jon*s attacks our notions of just what the narrative arts can do, leaving us scratching our heads as we applaud her audacity.
In “REVENGE OF THE EX!!!!!”, M@h@ Mi@n also pushes the limits of traditional writing, this time challenging those awful standards of typography and punctuation: why can’t a story be typed in italicized, 18-point font? Isn’t it obvious that some questions deserve multiple question marks???? And who’s to say that multiple exclamation marks are redundant?!!!!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?
Sh@net@ Oliv*r’s “Black Outs” examines the mood swings typical of teenagers, pushing those mood swings into the fascinating trope of split personalities. Also, the first half of Oliv*r’s story consists of rhymed couplets, a rhetorical strategy that mirrors the tension between conflict and harmony inherent in every person afflicted with multiple personality disorder.
Finally, M@j@ C@v@r makes a bold move by naming her story “Extra Credit.” Again, I can only assume this is a kind of postmodern tongue-in-cheek gesture on C@v@r’s part, a reference to the fact that I offered the “Scary Story” assignment as a way to earn–you guessed it–extra credit. Nothing slips by these kids. C@v@r is an innovator in what I like to call the “I-filled-up-all-the-lines-on-the-paper-so-now-the-story’s-over-regardless-of-the fact-that-so-much-still-remains-unresolved” style of writing. Courageously sacrificing any sense of closure, C@v@r instead opts for this stunning closer, shifting jarringly from third-person omniscient to first-person singular: “I only need a point from only a B and I really need a B, okay?” Sorry, sweetheart, I don’t think that’ll quite do it.
Noam Chomsky, Intellectual Elitism, Po-Mo Gibberish, More Attacks on Deconstruction, and Bad Writing Revisited
While doing some background research for an upcoming Graduate Symposium I’ll be participating in later this month (more on that in the future), I somehow stumbled upon this post from Noam Chomsky in which the famous linguist/activist attacks post-modernism and its heroes. In this email/posting Chomsky criticizes what he views as “a huge explosion of self- and mutual-admiration among those who propound what they call “theory” and “philosophy,”” as little beyond “pseudo-scientific posturing.” Immediately, my thoughts jumped to the discussion of the Sokal Hoax I posted a few weeks back. Chomsky continues his affront to post-structuralism, arguing, much like Sokal, that the major figures of this movement–Derrida, Lacan, Foucault, Kristeva, etc.–obfuscate their arguments with an incoherent vocabulary rife with misused and misapplied scientific terminology. Chomsky on Derrida:
“So take Derrida, one of the grand old men. I thought I ought to at least be able to understand his Grammatology, so tried to read it. I could make out some of it, for example, the critical analysis of classical texts that I knew very well and had written about years before. I found the scholarship appalling, based on pathetic misreading; and the argument, such as it was, failed to come close to the kinds of standards I’ve been familiar with since virtually childhood. Well, maybe I missed something: could be, but suspicions remain […]”
Ouch!
But Chomsky’s not done yet:
“Some of the people in these cults (which is what they look like to me) I’ve met: Foucault (we even have a several-hour discussion, which is in print, and spent quite a few hours in very pleasant conversation, on real issues, and using language that was perfectly comprehensible — he speaking French, me English); Lacan (who I met several times and considered an amusing and perfectly self-conscious charlatan, though his earlier work, pre-cult, was sensible and I’ve discussed it in print); Kristeva (who I met only briefly during the period when she was a fervent Maoist); and others. Many of them I haven’t met, because I am very remote from from these circles, by choice, preferring quite different and far broader ones […] I’ve dipped into what they write out of curiosity, but not very far, for reasons already mentioned: what I find is extremely pretentious, but on examination, a lot of it is simply illiterate, based on extraordinary misreading of texts that I know well (sometimes, that I have written), argument that is appalling in its casual lack of elementary self-criticism, lots of statements that are trivial (though dressed up in complicated verbiage) or false; and a good deal of plain gibberish.”
Illiterate gibberish? Charlatan? Cults ? (This is a really common charge leveled at psychoanalysis in particular, and when one considers that both the work of Freud and Lacan was carried on by their respective daughters, there may be some validity to the claim. Still…)
Double-ouch!
Two things:
First, as a linguist, Chomsky is searching for an underlying, “universal grammar” or deep structure, a core pattern that underpins/organizes/generates all human languages. In this sense, Chomsky is searching for an ideal, a foundation. This method is in direct opposition to deconstruction, which as I understand it, seeks to decenter and disrupt all metaphysical anchors. I will never forget the class in transformational syntax I took at the University of Florida with Mohammed Mohammed (or MoMo, as we affectionately were permitted to call him). The class was a split grad/undergrad section, and MoMo scared away all of the undergrads in the first session, with the exception of myself and another student. After that point, he was always very kind to us (the undergrads) and cruel to the grads. MoMo was a Palestinian; he identified as a Jordanian refugee. He was a devout Chomskyian (cultishly so, perhaps). Derrida spoke at UF while I was in this class. I didn’t really understand what Derrida’s lecture was about, but it was very long and his English accent wasn’t so great. The next day in class, MoMo savaged Derrida for the entirety of the period on points both specific and general, most of it over our heads. It was a true rant, one of the best I’ve ever witnessed, culminating in (and I quote): “He’s full of shit!”
So Derrida certainly provoked MoMo, a strict Chomskyian–and why not? If you spend your academic career and your adult life searching for something that another person says you could never find, wouldn’t you be upset? (I believe that more than anything MoMo was upset over Derrida’s reception at UF, which was rock-starish to say the least). For MoMo, Derrida was a phony, a pied-piper misleading the children from the real issues.
Which brings me to point two–Chomsky is primarily a political figure, and really a pragmatist at heart. The core of his argument is not so much that po-mo writing is high-falutin’ nonsense, but rather that it ultimately serves no practical purpose. Here is where I would strongly disagree. The people that Chomsky attacks and their followers are re-evaluating the canon and the very notion of received wisdom. Chomsky attacks them for “misreading the classics”–but just what are the classics, and whose value systems created the notion that the classics were indeed “classic”? If Derrida & co. appear to “misread,” it is because they seek to recover the marginalized knowledge that has been buried under a sediment of givens as “truth.” Yes, the post-modern movement might have elitist tendencies, and yes, the subjects and themes of their work might not have much to do on the surface with the plight of a refugee (cf. MoMo in Jordan in 1948)…but the goal is actually in line with Chomsky’s goal–to make people question the powers that structure their lives.
I do agree, as I’ve said before, that post-modern writing often comes off as so-much sophistry and hogwash (I admit to plenty of this myself), that in some sense it relies too heavily on a coded vocabulary that seems unaccessible to the untrained eye, and that all too often an air of self-congratulation, an atmosphere of winks and nods replaces an environment of real thinking and debate. But my real take is this: any philosophy that could shake MoMo into discomposure is good. MoMo is a brilliant man and his class was fascinating, but to have seen him that day–his feathers so ruffled, his foundations tested–so infuriated over ideas–that was a beautiful thing. Right then, I knew there must be something to Derrida, something I wanted to figure out. And that’s what the best of these writers do–they infuriate us by provoking the truths that we are so sure that we hold in ourselves. They destabilize our safe spaces. They don’t allow for easy answers; they rebuke tradition. And if this approach falls into the norm in academia, becomes lazy and sedimentary, undoubtedly someone will come along and call “bullshit” on it, thus reigniting debate, questions, language. Nietzsche speaks of language as a series of hardened metaphors, language as petrified lava, sedimentary givens. This is the goal of deconstruction: to get that lava flowing again.
The Sokal Hoax, Friedrich Nietzsche, Attacks on Deconstruction, and More Bad Writing
NYU physics professor Alan Sokal wrote a paper entitled “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity” which was published in 1996 in Duke University’s Social Text, a cultural studies journal. The same day the article was published–with no peer review, incidentally–Sokal announced in Lingua Franca that the whole thing was a hoax, a collection of nonsense, buzzwords, and jargon, making liberal use of recontextualized quotes. Sokal’s intention was to provoke the postmodern tendencies of humanities professors, whom he viewed as having a poor understanding of the science they critiqued.
Now, anyone who has spent any time in any university’s cultural studies department or English department (they tend to be the same thing nowadays) knows that postmodernism is all the rage: the dominant thinkers tend to be of the deconstructionist/post-structuralist school of thought–Derrida, Kristeva, Deleuze, Foucault, Butler, and so on. The major goal of deconstructive analysis is to disrupt the traditional, metaphysical groundings that have been accepted as “natural” to philosophy–to free up marginalized and subjugated areas of thought and break through the layers of sedimentary “givens.” In this sense, deconstruction takes a major queue from the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. In many ways Nietzsche provided not only some of the major questions that initiate a deconstructive philosophy, but also a model for how those ideas would be presented in writing.
Nietzsche’s writing is poetic and often ironically self-reflexive. In his essay “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense,” he makes the claim that all language is an anthropomorphic jumble of metaphors, that concepts are only constructed upon other concepts, all understood through an anthropocentric viewpoint that is impossible to abandon. Nietzsche’s writing contains this awareness; he frames his argument in a series of illustrative metaphors and similes, arguing that language does not permit people to reach the true essence of “the thing in itself”; rather, concepts are the “fractured echo[es]” of the ego seeking recognition—deceptions and illusions. In Nietzsche’s view, science can only build on these empty metaphors and therefore all scientific, empirical knowledge is a house of cards waiting to collapse. Nietzsche prefers an irrational, intuitive, liquid approach to life—a “playing with seriousness”: by abandoning stoic, static reasoning, one will gain “illumination, cheer, and redemption.” This joyful disruption is one starting point for the deconstructionists who Sokal attacked in his hoax.
Sokal obviously disagrees with Nietzsche: as a physicist, Sokal clearly values empirical, rational thought. But his real disagreement is with his perception of an abusive misuse of scientific and mathematic terminology by humanities professors. Sokal views the majority of post-modern theorists as perpetrators of hogwash, arrogant elitists who obfuscate their hollow ideas in jargon.
Okay. Now. So. Is Sokal right? Is there a tendency in humanities departments toward obscurantism with elitist undertones? Absolutely. However, I see this as the academic byproduct of the writers under attack, the detritus of myriad misunderstandings and misreadings. Nobody’s perfect, obviously. I disagree that certain of the writers Sokal attacks–Julia Kristeva in particular (a hero of mine, whose writing I find to be both wonderfully lucid and poetically profound)–are purposefully difficult. Most of the deconstructionists mentioned above take their lead from Nietzsche, and thus employ a strange, elliptical, roundabout and often poetic strategy to their writing. The deconstructionist methodology itself is an affront to easy readings–simply put, it’s meant to make you think. Furthermore, philosophy, for most of us, is not beach reading.
Interestingly, and perhaps ironically, Sokal’s gesture is an essentially postmodern move, a deconstructive move–a challenge to the new establishment of academic humanities and cultural studies. Even his use of recontextualized quotes is an affirmation of Derrida’s concept of iterability. The greatest value of the hoax is that it reinforces the tenets of deconstruction: to upset the places we feel are comfortable and safe, prompting constant re-examination of our aims and goals. Sokal’s hoax initiates a dynamic rethinking of the way we write and the way we read. Who are we writing for? How are we presenting our ideas? Do we understand what we are saying? More than anything, Sokal’s hoax calls attention to the constant need for peer review, for academia to question itself, its products, its institutions.
Robocop-like Strategies of Carceral Negotiation, Racially Heteroglossic Wilds, and More Bad Writing
Even though Denis Dutton discontinued his annual Bad Writing award (published in Philosophy and Literature) way back in 1999, it’s still fun to take a look at some of the worst sentences in academia from years past. Notable winners (?!) include Judith Butler and Frederic Jameson, but my favorite sample comes courtesy Professor Rob Wilson:
“If such a sublime cyborg would insinuate the future as post-Fordist subject, his palpably masochistic locations as ecstatic agent of the sublime superstate need to be decoded as the “now-all-but-unreadable DNA” of a fast deindustrializing Detroit, just as his Robocop-like strategy of carceral negotiation and street control remains the tirelessly American one of inflicting regeneration through violence upon the racially heteroglossic wilds and others of the inner city.”
With sentences like this, it’s no wonder that many people consider academics to be obscurantists, sophists who rely on the trickery of word play to cover up vacuous thoughts (in a candid moment, I might fess up to occasionally dabbling in such writing. OK. I admit it. I confess. Mea culpa. I’m guilty of thousands and thousands of bad sentences. So there.)
Tomorrow, we’ll take a look at how hoaxes perpetrated by Alan Sokal and others have challenged the often-pseudoscientific field of post-modern cultural studies.
Biblioklept 