Good Writing: The Resistance to Certain Ideas
I have a problem with the concept of "bad styling of sentences." This type of language gets thrown around as code to reject certain theoretical methods and frameworks. For example, many critics politically/philosophically oppose the idea that as social beings, they lack agency or even a substantively whole existence. They want to see themselves as being in control over their actions. As a result, they cannot stand when other authors syntactically realign agency to reflect the subject's lack of authority over itself. (Yes, "itself": according to such theory, gender is a construct. "Subject" does not equal "person." "Subject" is the symbolic construction of "person," and that symbolic construct is always incomplete and contradictory.)
Writing about decentered subjectivity, gaps in subjectivity, and the effects of negative spaces on positive spaces can get pretty complex when the subject of discussion is how a character, person, institution, or culture thinks and acts. Look at it this way: If you're trying to describe how a car runs, but in your description you won't acknowledge anything larger than quarks, electrons, protons, or neutrons, then the writing is going to get fucked up.
Let's finally admit what we refuse to admit: There are different schools of thought when it comes to what qualifies as "good writing." Some of the theoretical schools of thought equate "good writing" with "conscious choices." If you the writer mean the semantic and syntactic implications of what you write, no matter how counter-intuitive the result is, it's good writing.
I am offended (literally, no joke) when one school of thought dismisses another school of thought as being merely "bad writing." To me, this is not really an argument about writing. This is an argument about what ideas we are allowed to express. The appeal to "good writing" in academic discourse is usually an attempt to censor thought. I see such arguments as in fact contributing to ignorance. That's why I feel so strongly about them--strong enough to get offended.
So I would never challenge another author, even a comp teacher, on the form of what was said, unless I was challenging what the form communicates about the content.
And in a classroom, I teach students to apply conscious decisions. That's the closest I will come to the concept of "good writing." I won't even utter the words.
Writing about decentered subjectivity, gaps in subjectivity, and the effects of negative spaces on positive spaces can get pretty complex when the subject of discussion is how a character, person, institution, or culture thinks and acts. Look at it this way: If you're trying to describe how a car runs, but in your description you won't acknowledge anything larger than quarks, electrons, protons, or neutrons, then the writing is going to get fucked up.
Let's finally admit what we refuse to admit: There are different schools of thought when it comes to what qualifies as "good writing." Some of the theoretical schools of thought equate "good writing" with "conscious choices." If you the writer mean the semantic and syntactic implications of what you write, no matter how counter-intuitive the result is, it's good writing.
I am offended (literally, no joke) when one school of thought dismisses another school of thought as being merely "bad writing." To me, this is not really an argument about writing. This is an argument about what ideas we are allowed to express. The appeal to "good writing" in academic discourse is usually an attempt to censor thought. I see such arguments as in fact contributing to ignorance. That's why I feel so strongly about them--strong enough to get offended.
So I would never challenge another author, even a comp teacher, on the form of what was said, unless I was challenging what the form communicates about the content.
And in a classroom, I teach students to apply conscious decisions. That's the closest I will come to the concept of "good writing." I won't even utter the words.
posted by Gray Kane at
5:19 PM
5 Comments:
Gray,
I agree completely that it's blind narrow prejudice to dismiss the writing style of a school, or even of a brilliant thinker like Zizek, as "bad writing." But would you really not identify a sentence like "The chances a person at that stage can have published something worth chopping that many trees down is unlikely" as bad writing?
Doug
The way to address it isn't through terms like "bad writing." The way to address it is in terms of the degree of conscious decisions. Did the author intend a lack of subject-verb agreement? There's no visible evidence to support that position.
The sentence also looks like the author had two ideas that he semi-consciously crammed together as if they were one thought: Very few books are worth chopping down trees to publish, and even fewer assistant professors are capable of authoring that degree of quality.
Rather than contemplate the separateness of these two thoughts, the author obviously wanted to fuse the two ideas together in the reader's mind. This much looks like a conscious decision. But the sentence gives the impression that the author thought more about how he wanted the reader to perceive the sentence, than how easily the reader would process it. In other words, he thought more about what he wanted to do than what happens as a result of what he did.
In some cases, authors have to forfeit the facility with which a reader processes the information in order to remain faithful to the accuracy of the information.
This sentence doesn't appear to fit within that category. In my opinion, the information isn't significant enough to merit such privileging of it.
But I haven't read the essay as a whole. Perhaps the essay as a whole culminates into that sentence. Maybe the author wants the reader to stumble there, and to re-read it.
However, the lack of subject-verb agreement in the sentence reduces the likelihood of that scenario. Instead, that grammatical error supports the claim that the author didn't think consciously enough about that sentence.
On the one hand, our thinking about sentences in terms of conscious decisions will help students to see the flexibility of grammar, and even of spelling in the case of neologisms.
On the other hand, our enforcement of value judgments with terms like "good" or "bad" writing has an unconscious effect on our students. Somewhere in their minds, good writing = x, and bad writing = y. As a result, when another author uses y for a strategic reason, they will dismiss it blindly in terms of its being "bad writing."
We don't want to encourage our society's reduction of complexity to the category of "bad writing" or worse, "bad thinking." Many professors and students actively vocalize that stance.
The best we can do is to change the terms.
Besides, "good" and "bad" are too vague anyway.
By the way, you mention Zizek, but Derrida is a fucking poet.
And Lacan is a performance artist!
Gray,
I see what you mean, but as you can probably guess, I don't much like the language of "conscious decision." It reeks in my nose of rationalism, the notion that reason is an autonomous power (king or CEO) in the individual's head that makes executive decisions, and the rest of the body obeys.
I would prefer to think of these things not so much in terms of "conscious decisions" as of writer-reader interactivity. The writer "senses" (prefeels) how the reader will react, and writes so as to shape that reaction; the anticipatory prefeeling shapes the writer's writing. So the problem with Waters' sentence is not that he isn't consciously deciding to write "chances is unlikely" as a deliberate deviation from "chances are small," but that he is insufficiently in touch with his readers, and therefore gets inadequate guidance from them.
For that matter, how does your rationalist talk of "conscious decisions" square with your talk in this post about decentered subjectivities, depersonalized agencies, and the rest?
I understand your concerns about rationalism.
Decentered subjectivity is what prevents the Age of Reason interpretation of "conscious decisions." Consciousness is sporadic. That's why we need multiple drafts to create a finished product. That's also why there's no such thing as a perfect draft; we always can revise the draft again because there's always something else we can become conscious of.
That's also why peer reviews are so important. Others can point out areas where we weren't conscious.
I understand that you're concerned about the mind/body divide. But I don't see the mind/body divide. The body, mind, and Others/others are simultaneously psychic constructs and producers of psychic constructs. This doesn't mean that there's a "real" body out there that we can't get to. Instead, the psyche is far closer to Heidegger's Dasein.
Just as the word "psyche" refers not just to "mind" but also to "soul," the psyche is far more complicated than the word "mind" can represent. I see it as our being-in-the-word.
This interpretation of "psyche" is very similar to your somaticism.
But while you focus on having students interpret body language while they write, I have students include the reader (and sometimes the reader's body language) in their conscious decisions. In other words, essentially we're doing the same thing, just with a slightly different emphasis.
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