The Politics of Textual Vehemence, or Go to Your Room until You Learn How to Act

Abstract

I N H E R B 0 0 K The Alchemy of Race and Rights, Patricia J. Williams shows how conventions of academic writing work to suppress challenging claims, blunt terms, and raised voices (1991).1 Williams relates how her efforts to register the stakes of scholarly disputesby articulating anger over injustice or by acknowledging her own experiences as an African-American woman-have encountered resistance from law journal editors who find her expressions inappropriate to scholarly discourse. What Williams identifies as an ideology of style rooted in a social text of neutrality requires writers to eliminate argumentative intensity, textual emotion, and rhetorical confrontation (48). While ostensibly neutral, these prohibitions against textual vehemence in academic writing have ideological effects and serve a socially conservative function. They hide the unequal access to power that makes people angry in the first place, isolate the forms of academic argument from their social causes and consequences, and deprive aggrieved groups and oppositional voices of the forceful, confrontational, affective language often required to displace entrenched ideas and interests. Rather than be impartial, the essentially political nature of social warrants of academic etiquette serve entrenched interests by encouraging aggrieved parties to give up part of their bargaining power-their emotional force and conviction-prior to negotiation (Kochman 1984). While the intent of holding to such conventions may not seem so, the