Equal, That Is, to the Field Itself: Stylistic Mimesis in Critical Writing

Abstract

THE PHRASING IN THE SINGULAR of this forum's key query--Why do I have to write like that?--allows it to be read either as a rhetorical or non-rhetorical question. As a rhetorical question, it might be rephrased resistantly, in teenager-speak, as And I have to do this why? Non-rhetorically, it asks Why do I have to do this? and raises issue of disciplinary compunctions. Of course, two meanings are not entirely separable. But this brief reflection will pursue second route. Criticisms of baleful language of inquiry are not new, so it is worth recalling at outset that we were once exhorted, both directly and by example, to cultivate this theoretical style. Those who attended ACCUTE in 1980s, and meetings of its lively Theory Group in particular, will recall chain of reasoning: natural or commonsensical language use (whether in critical writing or, for example, Victorian realist novel) laid claims to linguistic transparency and thus occluded traces of its own (power/knowledge) operations. I particularly recall a memorable phrase in circulation at time and even today: the tyranny of lucidity. Even without explicit encouragement in this direction, aspiring critics were offered ample precedent in writings of some key European theorists (who were sometimes victims of clunky and not always idiomatic translation, a factor not entirely incidental to this tale). The bold generic blendings, syntactic experimentations, neologisms, and elliptical formulations of Barthes, Derrida, Irigaray, and Lacan, for example, were read as signaling a new style, one true to gaps, erasures, deferrals, rhythms, connections, and complexities of signifying systems these authors sought to understand. As a result, we remain expectant of, if perhaps now less tolerant of, stylistic density and complexity in writing. But is also important to remember that complaints about (what we might call) overwriting predate advent of theory to North American academy by some fifty to seventy years. Janice Radway notes that by 1920s and 1930s, a set of highly specialized academic discourses and practices had arisen to challenge older generalist or liberal arts educational model. (1) This was result of three factors, all occurring more or less simultaneously from period 1870 to 1915: in United States, rapid growth of dedicated research universities developed on German model; more general professionalization of academia leading to guild and bureaucratic discourses; and--this is Radway's primary interest--the rapid proliferation and thus stratification of print, particularly periodical production, which permitted rise of specialized academic publications but also allowed a broader range of cultural commentators (the dreaded middlebrow) to position themselves publicly and horn in on academic's traditional turf. Thus new was designed not only to meet new knowledge demands but to strengthen demarcations of expertise. I would wish to add a further element, however, which is evidenced by fact that new specialist style involved more than deployment of technical terms or jargon. In addition, it was marked--as its detractors never ceased to complain--by a discursive densification perceived as obscurantist or hermetic. At work is a sort of seepage: new paradigms, and new demands for analytical complexity, create a greater sense of phenomenological complexity (note tail wagging dog), whose description demands a more complex in its turn. Of course, critics always have matched medium to message: consider Matthew Arnold's Attic style, or, even earlier, Pope's Essay on Criticism in which well-known lines of representative verse function as a synecdoche for larger project. We could follow this escalator back to classical times, with critics modelling ways they think writing ought to be: weighty, or witty, or decorous. …