"Ordinary language," antiintellectualism, and language as a barrier to understanding

[Antonio the Sixth]

As someone with, at this point, over a decade of experience in social sciences academia (wtf is wrong with me), this is something that I have increasingly struggled with. My hope was always to write things that I actually would enjoy reading, but if I'm honest with myself, my doctoral dissertation was a total failure on this front. It contains quite a bit of technical jargon, and its tone is dry and does very little to engage the reader emotionally into the stakes of what's discussed. This isn't how I set out to write, but it's how it came out anyways. I think this goes to show that abstruse academic writing isn't necessarily something people only do to confuse or impress their readership with a false sense of profundity. A lot of academics (myself often included) simply don't know how to phrase our thinking in ways that are easily intelligible and engaging to a general public.

There are a few reasons for that. One is simply that many concepts we discuss simply don't have a common, everyday term that adequately describes them. To take an example most people here are familiar with, how do you translate "realignment" to someone who isn't into politics that much? You can, but you have to spend a lot of time and probably multiple sentences just laying the basic groundwork for the term to make sense. This is something I've had to do in real life to explain to people what my research is about (you know, the first question everyone asks a PhD!) and it's awkward as hell. Obviously that's not a viable solution in an academic paper, where you have very little space to work with. But this can rapidly become a vicious cycle, as academics who have a habit of discussing a given subject in depth develop increasingly intricate conceptual shortcuts that people on the outside can hardly follow. Even within political science, people in a subfield often have no idea what another subfield is up to anymore. And then, you might be actively encouraged to show off all that jargon to show people you've learned it, as an indicator that you have mastered the full depth of the discipline. Once you have that, the conditions are set for a sort of terminological arms race, where even academics who dislike jargon are forced to engage in it in a competitive setting.

This experience has really made me respect the work of vulgarizers - people who take all this abstruse academic pablum and make an effort to translate it into understandable, everyday language. They're often shunned by "pure" academics (although thankfully attitudes are beginning to change) but their work is arguably the most important of all, as otherwise academia would be an entirely closed system with no impact on the real world. Honestly, even I often feel like I've learned more in the past few years from vulgarizers than from academic works. Historians like Alessandro Barbero and Mike Duncan, or recently even a lots of Youtube channels I've been binging about physics, math or linguistics, have really expanded and enriched my understanding. I would encourage everyone, if they've ever had a curiosity about a discipline they didn't pursue academically, to get back into it through that vehicle. No, it won't substitute for a decade of academic study (I for one find most political science vulgarization really pat and trite, but I know I'm not the target audience), but it will get you pretty damn far. I think we should all aspire to becoming polymaths, even if the pressure of society is toward hyper-specialization.

But that gets us to a final, really important point. Public intellectuals, and especially those who are involved in political activism SHOULD be vulgarizers. If your work is supposed to directly impact the goals and strategies pursued by movements that seek to change society, then it ought to be broadly understandable by society. I think that's where the real problem comes with Judith Butler and a lot of postmodern academics in their vein. Entirely aside from the question of whether their work is more abstruse than others in the discipline (which I'm not really qualified to judge on), the fact remains that they are using her to advocate for policies in the real world, without bothering to explain it to the people these policies would apply to. That's, dare I say, a fundamentally antidemocratic impulse. It gets even worse when people who are just plain activists adopt this kind of language - as they usually dumb it down to slogans that are entirely abstracted from the context where they made sense. That's how you end up with idiocies like the "only white people can be racist" canard or ranting against "ciswhiteheteropartiarchy" and whatnot. This kind of language is actively alienating to most people, and left-wing parties should make an effort to actively banish it from their ranks. At that point though, my problem isn't even with the academics anymore - more so with the kind of people who fetishize academia.

As a final note, I should make it clear that there's nothing wrong with good highbrow writing. There is nothing wrong with a rhetorical flourish, even one that is added just to sound fancy, as long as it works for its stated purpose. Being pretentious and pedantic can be fun and you have every right to be. God knows I like a good condescending retort as much as anyone. The important thing is to make sure you're writing in such a way as to actually be understood.