style, membership, future publics and the burden of world-making

For about the last fifteen years I have been more and more concerned about ideologies of clarity and accessibility. Folks who know perfectly well that one way to describe ideology is as common sense assumptions about everyday practices seem to take the clear and accessible as unproblematic goods.

A few days ago I googled "critiques of clarity and accessibility" to see if others were working on what might be problematic about these and related terms and assumptions. But there were no critiques of these terms. Clarity and accessibility were over and over always the solutions to various other critiques, not subjects of analysis themselves.

The best discussion of this subject I've come across myself is Michael Warner's essay "Styles of intellectual publics" in the book Just Being Difficult? Academic writing in the public arena (Stanford 2003). Here are bits from this essay I find most helpful in beginning to consider histories and ideologies of clarity and accessibility.

"In modernity...an extraordinary burden of world-making comes to be borne above all by style." (109)

"The possibility I would like to raise here is that those who write opaque left theory might very well feel that they are in a position analogous to Orwell's diarist--writing to a public that does not yet exist--and finding that their language can circulate only in channels hostile to it, they write in a manner designed to be a placeholder for a future public." (109)

Warner disputes readings of Orwell that espouse coming "as close as possible to an address to all persons," asking "Does Orwell really stand for the idea that accessible style leads to mass markets and therefore to effective politics?" (110)

He points to Adorno's distrust of "common canons of clairty" in which precision is devalued through mass culture and "an idealization of common sense that is based on commodity culture." "the expansiveness of mass circulation affects and distorts a desire for social membership on the part of readers.... The wide circulation of language in mass culture is perceived and treasured as a quality of style by those who misrecognize it as clarity and sense." (112)

"The false aesthetic of transparency, defining clarity as that which communicates widely, has a powerful social effect of normalization. One result is that it will naturally privilege the majority over less-familiar views.... The result is a kind of invisible power for dominant norms... alienated from the labor of judgment." (113)

"We begin to normalize intellectual work whenever we suppose a direct equation between value and numbers--imagining that a clear style results in a popular audience and therefore in effective political engagement. So deeply cherished is this way of thinking that to challenge it is to court derision, especially in journalistic contexts." (115)

"What kind of clarity is necessary in writing? Clarity for whom? ...different kinds of writing suit different purposes, that what is clear in one reading community will be unclear in another, that clarity depends upon shared conventions and common references, that one person's jargon is another person's clarity, that perceptions of jargon or unclarity change over time." (115)

"Should writing intended for academics in the humanities aspire to accessibility for everyone when we don't expect the same from writing in physics? Isn't such an expectation tantamount to a demand that there should be no such thing as intellectuals in the humanities, that the whole history of the humanistic disciplines should make no difference, and that someone starting from scratch to enter into a discussion--of, say, the theory of sexuality--should be at no disadvantage compared to someone who had read widely in previous discussions of the question? ....It allows people to think cumulatively, without starting at each moment from the zero point of maximum accessibility." (115-6)

"Instead of assuming a self-evident standard of clarity and a moral obligation to follow it, one could argue that the imperative to write clearly is not the same as the need to write accessibly, that the project of an academic discipline requires a rigor of definition, argument, and debate. What would count as clarity, in this view, might remain highly specialized and inaccessible to lay audiences or journalists. Indeed, to the extent that clarity might require conceptual precision of very unfamiliar kinds, it might compete with accessibility." (116)

"Style performs membership.... At stake in the dispute about style, then, are different contexts for writing, different ways of imagining a public." (118)