Hiatus

Now that I’ve got the DaD blog up and running, I’ll be unplugging for the next week or so. The plan is to do some old-fashioned writing, the kind with footnotes and pagination.

Bored?

Tremble in awe at the mighty mightiness of The Mighty Red Pen,

Inquire into books at Books, Inq.,

Confess to your spouse about Chekhov’s Mistress,

Show books that you’re not against ‘em at Bookforum,

Or find out what to say at You Don’t Say.

In fact, click any link that strikes your fancy down yonder by the blogroll. You could also prove just how upstanding and righteous you are by clicking on Donor’s Choose and / or the UN Food Program above.

I just know you’ll make the right decision.

Ingratitude

The fourth installment in my series on handwriting: an affidavit signed July 16, 1881 by Charles Julius Guiteau, who had shot President James Garfield two weeks earlier at the Baltimore and Potomac Rail Road Station.

Prior to assassinating the President, Guiteau had been a journalist, blackmailer, preacher and spousal abuser. He was probably insane; a plea to that effect failed at trial and Guiteau was hung in Washington DC less than a year after writing the “Address to the American People” shown above.

Georgetown has his papers.

Substance, Part III

This is the third and last in my series on Jonathan Gottschall’s essay “Measure for Measure,” in which the author argues that literary studies ought to become more like the sciences. In my first post, I argued that Gottschall’s initial paragraphs establish qualities for litcrit to aspire toward – firmness, stability, durability – even though he himself does not adroitly exhibit these qualities when he frames his argument. In my second post, I showed how Gottschall shrewdly describes a number of “scientific” literary studies in such a way so that even those who object to the designs of these experiments will be drawn into adopting the standard of firmness that it is Gottschall’s aim to promulgate.

In this last post, I want to deal with what Gottschall calls “philosophy of knowledge” and “standards of evidence,” terms that appear more and more as the paper goes on. This frequency reflects that at a certain point the paper starts to raise epistemological claims, including an attempt to establish a unitary standard of rigor, evidence and knowledge. This notion has problems, and so it is exactly the sort of idea that needs to be proposed in a very delicate way in order to be even moderately persuasive. In this post, I argue that Gottschall’s decision to “arrive at” this notion toward the end of the essay represents a modestly successful rhetorical choice only because he begins to make epistemological claims after first subsuming the work of the critic to the work of the scientist.

To see how this process takes place, let’s pick up where we left off, just past the middle of the essay. Until this juncture, Gottschall has mostly been urging critics to try out scientific tools – statistics, surveys, programs – to study literature and reading. This recommendation ought to be familiar to many in the field, which already has heroes with an “instinct for the scientific” from Vladimir Propp and the formalists to Janice Radway and Franco Moretti. Personally, I’d call this type of work a “science of literature” rather than literary science, but that’s a fussbudget point at the moment. More importantly, anyone who really cares about literature will concede that there is some value to surveying readers and using programs to track styles. We may not agree that such studies ought to drive the agenda, but they are in any case harmless.

Had Gottschall left the argument there, I suspect that the reaction would have been affirmative from the wider literary critical field. As it turns out, however, the enterprise soon ceases to be an excursus on fun science projects, and it becomes about knowledge: Gottschall also wants us to derive literary theory from the “sciences of the mind.” Here’s where the transition to the epistemological idiom happens:

Contemporary literary theory […] is deeply rooted in the “blank slate” theory of the mind - the idea that the human mind is overwhelmingly shaped by social and cultural influences, rather than by biology. But this theory has perished in the sciences, killed off by advances in evolutionary biology, cognitive science, neuroscience, and other related fields. So most of the “big ideas” in contemporary literary studies have been flawed from their inception - they have been based, at least in part, on failed theories of human nature. Armed with a current understanding of the sciences of the mind, literary scholars could develop surer interpretations of individual works, answer larger questions, such as why literary plots vary within such narrow bounds, and even plumb the ultimate wellsprings of the human animal’s strange, ardent love affair with story.

Gottschall has harnessed the momentum from his earlier suggestion about using science and channeled this energy into forging a theory about the role of the critic. In Gottschall’s view, scientists discover how minds work, and critics are supposed to read about the scientists’ consensus on the subject and then draw conclusions about how literature works. Moreover, every time that the status quo changes in the pages of Neuroscience Today, literary critics must presumably trash all of the criticism that they had just completed based upon the earlier model, and start anew based on the prevailing wisdom offered in the latest vogue.

It’s a scientists world, and critics just live in it.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Gottschall’s idea represents a backlash against the types of projects that have become common after Thomas Kuhn’s “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.” Ever since this was published in 1962, while historians have shown that developments in science are “socially constructed,” critics have considered it within their ken to analyze scientific prose to discover cultural influences in the writings of Galileo, Bacon and Darwin. By contrast, in Gottschall’s world, the scientist’s work is in some way impervious to these literary critical interventions, because it is only through science that a critic may justify his own enterprises. Literary critical ideas are procured from scientific conclusions, not vice versa.

This is a big move from the “fun with science” part of the essay. Now that we have burned down the house of criticism and moved its inhabitants into the house of science, it is easy and even seems pretty generous to show the refugee critics around their new digs:

But if ideas like “the beauty myth” or “the death of the author” arise from loose theorizing and defunct models of human psychology, how have they managed to thrive for decades in the world’s top literature departments? The answer lies partly in our standards of evidence: Instead of forcing professors to rigorously test their big ideas, as scientific methods do, literary methods encourage us merely to collect and highlight evidence that seems to confirm them. The result of this laxity, as Berkeley’s Frederick Crews points out, is that “our bogus experiments succeed every time.” And since it is so hard to be wrong in literary studies, it is equally hard to be right. So books and papers pile up but, more often than not, genuine advances in knowledge do not. To fix this problem, literary scholars need to develop more rigorous ways of testing their ideas, demand a higher standard of proof from their colleagues, and be willing to discard the theories that fail.

Notice how the language of stability has come back - applied not only to the content of litcrit, but to the epistemology with which it becomes rigorous. Traditionally, it has been believed that different scholarly fields possess different standards of rigor. Indeed, it is not so crazy to say that a discipline “is” its unique standards of substantiation and conjecture – thus the sociologist will exhibit rigorousness in one way, the biologist in another, and the philosopher in yet another. In the case of literary criticism, many of these standards arise from, well, literature, or at least from theories developed by those who spend most of their time studying it. But in Gottschall’s program, literary critical rigor ought to arise from the standards of science, a unitary means for recognizing evidence and deriving conclusions in all fields of knowledge. Something is only true if it is scientifically true, and a theory about Hamlet is only good if it is testable using criteria that are in some way equivalent to those used to study quarks, infant mortality rates and the mating habits of dormice.

My point is that Gottschalls’ essay doesn’t just “move literary studies closer to the model of the sciences” but it removes the capacity for unique rigor that makes literary study different from the sciences, replacing it with Gotschall’s own interpretation of what the sciences consider to be proof. The effect is to increase the range of what criticism will look like in the world of tomorrow, while simultaneously curtailing not only its theories but also its capacity to self-theorize and self-understand. This is the price for the “optimism” and “aspirations” that Gottschall ends his paper promising us: a literary criticism so firm, stable and durable that it needn’t be literary or critical.

From a rhetorical point of view, it has been vital to keep this implication subterranean until the second half of the essay. Only after Gottschall has placed the critic in the world of the scientist can he make it seem like he is rescuing literary criticism by showing it how to meet the burdens of an extraordinarily unitary scientific standard of evidence that is not organic to the literary field. Of course, by foisting these simplistic standards upon criticism we only eradicate one of the mechanisms that hold such reductive gestures in check, and perhaps this has been the point all along.

In any case, I hope that I have shown how a particular argumentative structure has been useful to Gotschall’s purpose, even if I confess a prejudice against that purpose: after all, in the paradigm that he proposes, there would be little rigor value attached to the highly theoretical, absently wandering and patently insubstantial analytic exercise that I have just finished performing.

Substance, Part II

In the last post, I examined Jonathan Gottschall’s recent essay about integrating the aims, techniques and rigors of the sciences into the study of literature. I pointed out that in order to stage his argument clearly, Gottschall built two constellations of adjectives. The first described poor literary criticism …

Theoretical, Speculative, Irrelevant, Wandering, Circuitous, Bending to Fashion and the Pronouncements of False Leaders,

… and the second described what a better litcrit might look like …

Sure, Firm, Gradually Accumulated, New, Durable, Steadily Built, Solid.

In a sense, the purpose of the essay is to move litcrit from the first world to the other, and science is but a means to effect this end.

In the earlier post, I took Gottschall to task for using polemical rhetoric that unduly eschews the beliefs of the very people that it wants to convince. I also criticized him for promoting the idea of integrating obdurate scientific qualities into literary studies, even though he does not himself employ such concrete data to describe the current state of the literary critical field.

When last we saw him, Gottschall was in some rhetorical trouble. Surprisingly, however, it is at just this point that the argument begins to achieve its strongest force. In this second of three posts, I will look at how Gottschall offers his main point, and I will parse the ways in which one might object to how he substantiates this point. I argue that the author finesses his readers into accepting solid, built knowledge as the goal of literary study by framing the way in which his own evidence can be challenged. In other words, Gottschall has structured his argument in such a way that even if we say he is wrong, we are only drawn more deeply into his paradigm.

It’s one of those rhetorical moves that is just so smart and so sneaky that you know it must be an accident.

Anyway, let’s pick up where we left off, at the moment that Gottschall makes his main proposal:

Literary studies should become more like the sciences. Literature professors should apply science’s research methods, its theories, its statistical tools, and its insistence on hypothesis and proof. Instead of philosophical despair about the possibility of knowledge, they should embrace science’s spirit of intellectual optimism. If they do, literary studies can be transformed into a discipline in which real understanding of literature and the human experience builds up along with all of the words.

To sell us on the approach and to illustrate some of its results, Gottschall offers three instances in which scientific methodologies have been employed to study literature. In the first, he explains that statistical work on hundreds of folk tales has shown that our culture places no greater emphasis on the “beauty myth” than other societies, proving that we are no more unusually sexist than others. Next, Gottschall argues that modern literary theorists subscribe to the theory that “the author is dead,” a notion that he takes to mean that readers manufacture their own idiosyncratic meanings. In fact, we are told, according to a study of “analytic responses” by 500 literary scholars, there is little variation in the thoughts and feelings of readers about literary characters. Finally, Gottschall shows that computers have helped to bring stylometric proof to the old question about Shakespeare’s authorship, while also falsifying the notion that literary traditions change suddenly in fits and starts that coincide with historical change.

Flush from these empirical victories, Gottschall proclaims

Studies like these showcase the promise of applying a scientific approach: Relatively simple experiments can upend decades’ worth of untethered theoretical speculation, exposing flawed assumptions and focusing scholars’ attention on fresh and productive questions.

Although there’s nothing I like better than untethered theoretical speculation, I’ve got to admit that this stuff sounds promising. But let’s imagine how an antagonist might rain on Gottschall’s parade. It seems to me that there are at least two lines of argumentation to choose from - one based on interpretation and another based on experimental practice.

In the first line, the antagonist would query how Gottschall has characterized the content of the theories that he claims to have debunked. Is “the beauty myth” really just a comparative argument about the relative sexism of western culture vis a vis all other cultures? Does the “death of the author” actually imply that readers just make up whatever they like when they read? Are questions about Shakespeare’s authorship really burning mainstream literary critical issues? Each one of these questions exerts pressure on the simplistic ways in which Gottschall understands the “speculations” that he objects to. I think that many antagonists would pursue this option.

However, a number of antagonists would also take a different path, and object to the aptness of the methods that the cited studies employ. Does it make sense to equate the folk tale with modern narrative forms as a way to “measure” the “amount” of beauty myth that given societies feel? Do the sheer numbers of these tales have meaning without considering their differing popularity, dispersion, novelty or context? If you want to look for variation in interpretations, does it make sense to take as a representative sample a group of professional interpreters of texts? It’s like asking a bunch of pole vaulters how they would get over a wall in order to understand how anyone would do it. And finally, what counts as “innovation” and “sudden” for the stylometric computer program that Gottschall cites, and would its conclusions change if we use different increments? These are but a sample of a range of potential methodological objections that an antagonist may launch.

What’s interesting about this situation is that if our hypothetical antagonist were to pursue this second line of objections - as many critics would - then he or she would be accepting the appropriateness of the paradigm that Gottschall is proposing. Once he or she is quibbling over methods, the antagonist is already evaluating the offered evidence purely on the basis of the standards that the author has laid out (Sure, Firm, Gradually Accumulated, New, Durable, Steadily Built, Solid). Ironically, Gottschall’s aim would be better served by citing bad science than good science here, because if he can get us to expend our energy objecting to the design of an experiment, then he has successfully distracted us from underlying conceptual and literary theoretical questions and convinced us to concede that experimental design is a more germane issue. We are now thinking like scientists.

I consider this to be the strongest aspect of the overall argument. Lured by desire to critique Gottschall’s evidence, we end up implicitly conceding the very point that this evidence substantiates.

It’s like quicksand: the more you struggle, the deeper you sink.

Next time: I look at how Gottschall wraps up his argument, specifically at the “Philosophy of Knowledge” that is behind his recommendations, and at the yearning for “optimism” that I consider to be the most earnest instinct at the heart of the project.

Substance, Part I

Jonathan Gottschall makes what is bound to be a controversial contribution to the ongoing discussion about how to bring focus to the field of literary studies - its purposes, methods and aims. This is a set of questions with which many writers struggle, often on purpose.  In his article for the Boston Globe, Gottschall contributes to the scrum by brazenly proposing that in order to survive and prosper, literary studies must answer these questions by borrowing from …

(wait for it)

… the sciences.

In the next series of posts, I will analyze a few dimensions of Gottschall’s essay. I should remind readers that this blog is about understanding how arguments work, not about refuting or bolstering particular positions, so I am not preoccupied with judging Gottschall’s case. Rather, I am interested in how the essay stages a curiously difficult rhetorical problem: this author is telling literary critics that there is a basic flaw in the disciplinary conventions that define them professionally and that they use to assess merit. Due to this flaw, the canons of value to which critics have devoted their minds must be jettisoned and replaced with a more successful variety that had been innovated for other people and purposes.

It’s a bit like trying to convince an apple that its core is rotten and so it ought to become an orange, which is obviously much tastier and more popular. Whether or not this change is possible (and whether or not you believe it makes sense to compare apples and oranges) you have to admit that in this scenario the apple is going to take a lot of convincing.

Over the next few posts I’ll track Gottschall’s successes and failures at this task. In this first installment, I focus on a couple of important ways in which the early parts of the essay undermine the likelihood that argument will succeed at reducing the critical reader’s skepticism.

Gottschall begins his essay with a lament that the study of literature is in deep trouble. Class enrollments and funding are in decline, scholars have difficulty finding work, books go under-published and under-read. As a result, the field had become “moribund, aimless and increasingly irrelevant.” To prove this to us, Gottschall quotes an article from The Nation by William Deresiewicz, who ominously suggests that the field is “slowly dying.”

It is strange that Gottschall has chosen to use a quote from an authority to substantiate his declination narrative. If the overall claim is going to be that we ought to make literary studies more like the sciences, why not use something that resembles scientific data here? Gottschall is happy to tell us that the field’s “vital signs are bad,” but he has chosen not to give us the numerical values of those signs, even though details on the current rates of publishing, hiring, enrollment and funding are indubitably out there to be had.

Gottschall’s unscientific characterization of the symptoms is all the worse because of the way he diagnoses the underlying problem in the next paragraph:

We literary scholars have mostly failed to generate surer and firmer knowledge about the things we study. While most other fields gradually accumulate new and durable understanding about the world, the great minds of literary studies have, over the past few decades, chiefly produced theories and speculation with little relevance to anyone but the scholars themselves. So instead of steadily building a body of solid knowledge about literature, culture, and the human condition, the field wanders in continuous circles, bending with fashions and the pronouncements of its charismatic leaders.

This passage does two things. First of all, it uses sarcasm (”the great minds” “fashions” “speculation”) in a way that is as unproductive as it is flip. This choice makes Gottschall’s intervention seem heroic and even iconoclastic to some readers, but the choice also undermines the case being made to literary critics, because it fails to respect the fact that even if they are wrong, scholars actually have perfectly good reasons for why they believe the theories at the heart of their discipline. Instead of acknowledging this, Gottschall veers into polemic. In my mind, what distinguishes a scholar from a polemicist is that even in disagreements, a scholar is at least interested in why his or her adversaries hold their erroneous beliefs. On the other hand, a polemicist prefers to mock these odious beliefs rather than make an effort to look at the forces that gave rise to them. Because this article is more in the latter voice, Gottschall has made his job harder if he wants to sell his suite of scientific methodologies to literary scholars.

Secondly, look at how wonderfully Gottschall sets out two constellations of attributes for us to use later on in the paper. A poor literary criticism is theoretical, speculative, irrelevant, wandering, circuitous, bending to fashion and the pronouncements of false leaders. By contrast, a better litcrit will be sure, firm, gradually accumulated, new, durable, steadily built, solid. Although this contrast is very useful, it reminds us of the earlier problem: by his very own metrics Gottschall’s understanding of the state of his field resembles the first constellation of words and not the second. Indeed, to prove that litcrit is in decline, Gottschall relies only on Deresiewicz’ pronouncement, which is hardly a form of substantiation that is gradually accumulated or durable. In other words, Gottschall is about to propose that we wield upon fiction a kind of analytic machinery that he has already shown himself to be unwilling to wield upon fact.

This is not an auspicious beginning. We’re just a few paragraphs in and this paper has already identified itself as polemical rather than scholarly - even though it is addressed to scholars - and Gottschall has also touted a way of grounding claims that his own prose plainly does not exhibit.

Things look grim, but all is not lost. Gottschall is about to rescue his argument in a really interesting and subtle way.

How, you ask?

Tune in next time…

There is Something Behind This

More DaD handwriting. This page is a note passed between Franklin Roosevelt and his adviser Harry Hopkins at the Yalta conference, as reproduced in “Roosevelt and Hopkins: An Intimate History” by playwright and speechwriter Robert Sherwood. Both Roosevelt and Hopkins loved to doodle and pass notes like this one.  Both would be dead within a year.

Gently Used

“What’s wrong with cliches?” asked John McIntyre’s reader. McIntyre cites Frank Kermode’s notion that a cliche is wrong because it is symptomatic of “used thinking.”

Well, sure it is.

But what’s wrong with that?

Elite

In a critique of developments in the election, Jonathan Chait takes time to discuss what he considers to be the key differences between liberal and conservative genres of populist rhetoric. Although clearly partisan and a little simplistic, this discussion is nonetheless marvelously succinct, accurate and well-illustrated, check it out.

Americans and the Airport

Lately, a number of writers have been using the airport as a metaphor, citing the indignities and inanities of air travel to articulate something definitive about American perception. The airport has long been a magical and overdetermined place - what Michel Foucault calls a “heterotopia,” a place that seems to exist in relation to all other places, “in such a way as to suspect, neutralize, or invent the set of relations that they happen to designate, mirror, or reflect.” The airport has also always been sexualized, from the days when shabby salesmen fantasized about floosie stewardesses - see The High and The Mighty - to current TV ads that exaggerate the act of disrobing for the sensors in order to peddle fashion or chewing gum.

Here, I’d like to speculate on how writers imbue the airport-as-America idea with such force. My purpose is not to deny that air travel rules are infuriating (see Harry Shearer’s “Tales of Airport Security“). Nor do I want to deny the reality that we think about air travel differently after 9/11. Rather, I want to ask how writers designate air travel as a legitimate experience from which one might derive an assessment of the American character itself. Airport security is surely a sign of the times; I want to query how it has also come to seem a sign of our souls, in the same way that writers made “the frontier,” “the road,” “the commons” and “the mall” definitive places that express the national experience. The larger goal is to see how writers make metaphors into cultural symptoms, and thereby give imprimatur to others who want to use metaphors to substantiate powerful claims about the way we live now.

Let’s look at a couple of recent items.

Writing in the Washington Post, Josef Joffe has argued that the number of international scientists coming to America from developed nations has declined “because the richer a country, the less willing its scientists are to brave the indignities they face before entering the United States.” Joffe contends that this decline is most deleterious for our economy, part of a “fear tax” extracted from society by the TSA, Homeland Security and the State Department, entities against which one is simply not allowed to pose counter-arguments.

There is another toll at the airport as well:

Will the 9/11 terrorist attacks change the American character in ways that John Adams’s laws and [Se. Joe] McCarthy’s mendacity could not? The answer is still “no” if you go to the heartland, where trusting librarians let this perfect stranger shove his memory stick into a public computer; they seemed to think that a virus scan referred to the common cold. The heartland is still Jefferson country. But when you travel through John F. Kennedy International Airport or Dulles International Airport, you notice nervousness bordering on angst, which is hardly a classic American trait. No, your neighbor will not let you leave your bag on the seat while you amble over to Starbucks.

The deep allegation here is that by imposing nervousness and angst - purportedly alien values - the airport experience is capable of perverting the soundness of traditional American character. One walks into Dulles an open-hearted “Jeffersonian,” one walks out spooked, cynical, morally violated and diminished.

Another recent view from the security check comes from columnist and former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan, one of the most respected opinion writers in the country. She writes in the Wall Street Journal:

America is in line at the airport. America has its shoes off, is carrying a rubberized bin, is going through a magnetometer. America is worried there is fungus on the floor after a million stockinged feet have walked on it. But America knows not to ask. America is guilty until proved innocent, and no one wants to draw undue attention. America left its ticket and passport in the jacket in the bin in the X-ray machine, and is admonished. America is embarrassed to have put one one-ounce moisturizer too many in the see-through bag. America is irritated that the TSA agent removed its mascara, opened it, put it to her nose, and smelled it. Why don’t you put it up your nose and see if it explodes? America thinks.

And, as always: Why do we do this when you know I am not a terrorist, and you know I know you know I am not a terrorist? Why this costly and harassing kabuki when we both know the facts, and would agree that all this harassment is the government’s way of showing “fairness,” of showing that it will equally humiliate anyone in order to show its high-mindedness and sense of justice? Our politicians congratulate themselves on this as we stand in line.

To Noonan, the government wastes money, harasses people, and merely puts on a show of fairness. This demoralizes society, breeds resentment and “encourages a sense that the normal are not in control, that common sense is yesterday.” Further: the government is also being disrespectful to the middle-aged woman, who had been the “ancestral arbiter and leader of society,” but is now “treated like everyone, without respect, like the loud ruffian and the vulgar girl on the phone. The middle-aged woman is the one spread-eagled over there in the delicate shell beneath the removed jacket, praying nothing on her body goes beep and makes people look.”

Noonan’s passage is fascinating. We start out with an abstraction (”America”) as a hypothetical entity waiting in line. Then “America” suddenly becomes a middle-aged woman as it approaches the gate, and then seems to become Noonan herself at the moment of humiliation. Once through the checkpoint, Noonan turns back into America as she proceeds to the gate. Whatever your reaction to this set of transformations, you’d have to agree that it a unique rhetorical maneuver.

More importantly, notice that Noonan’s argument pits the “theater” of fairness against authentic fairness. “Kabuki fairness” treats everyone equally irrespective of their ancestral ability to arbitrate society, while “real fairness” would be much different: according to the prose, middle aged women seem to have more right to their dignity than the ruffian or the vulgar girl. I think this is attitude is manifestly undemocratic, but I’m old fashioned, and maybe I’m pressing the reading too hard.

In any case, I want to highlight that while Joffe sees the airport as a place that infects people with alien values, Noonan sees it as a place that takes values away - common sense, normalcy, even her own odd view of “fairness.” Keeping these two values-based associations in mind, let’s move on.

My third version of the airport-as-America notion actually comes from a post about cars, one was written by the public intellectual Stanley Fish for his blog on the New York Times. It is among the best passages that Fish has written for the site, if only for the wit that he exhibits by tagging the post with the phrase “vehicular infidelity.”

Fish’s post is devoted to analyzing a series of ads in which we “hear the voice of” a dowdy, everyday car as it deals with the revelation that its owner is having an “affair” with sexy Avis rental cars on business trips. Fish concentrates especially on an ad titled “Look Back,” which features a battered Saab. He describes it:

The scene opens on a sparsely populated airport parking lot. A well-dressed man is getting himself together in preparation for boarding. He puts some trash on the dashboard, gets out of the car, kicks the door shut (wince!) and puts a coffee cup on the roof.

While all this is happening, the car is speaking in a mournful male voice. It/he says, “So, he’s going away with Avis, again. He’ll get something with the GPS so that he can find his lattes and his driving range. If that’s the way he wants it, fine.” But this moment of bravado-dignity doesn’t last. As the philandering driver walks away, he pauses and rummages in his pocket, concerned that he may have left something in the old clunker. Hope revives, and the SAAB says, “Did he just look back? I think he looked back.”

The last shot is of the parking lot, empty except for the forlorn automobile sitting there with an abandoned coffee cup, which it cannot see, on its abandoned “head.” Another voice — here’s where the traditional commercial kicks in — chimes in cheerfully, “One more reason why Avis should be your other car.”

One viewer who rates the ad on the internet likes it, but complains that “the gender of the voice of the vehicle should be the opposite gender of the owner.” No, these ads are indifferent to gender. Lust is lust and betrayal is betrayal, whether the relationship is gay or straight.

It is striking that of the four ads cited by Fish, three are set at airports. Fish doesn’t make much of this coincidence. In fact, in an early version of the post, he even accidentally referred to one scene as taking place at a train station. Nevertheless, let’s keep the airport in mind as we read Fish’s conclusion:

While Avis’s intention is, no doubt, to advance its corporate fortunes through these commercials, the image the ads project is less than flattering. Avis comes across as the supplier of temptation, the enabler of seduction, a corporate madame. Its stable of “hot cars” lure men and women to default on their responsibilities, to throw away the tried and true, to surrender to the meretricious glitter of the new. But these wiles are defeated by the sympathy we are made to feel for those who have been harmed by them.

If Avis is the madame, then the airport is the brothel, full of temptations for otherwise upright men and women to relinquish their commitments and sully their values. Now consider this notion in light of the other posts cited above. Joffe considers the airport to be a place that grafts “nervousness and angst” onto a naturally open American character. Meanwhile, Noonan sees the indignities of the airport destroying common sense and fairness. All three of these authors are talking about values, a fact that almost imperceptibly designates the airport as a venue in which morality tales might take place.

I think that this designation is relatively new, and it lends force to the airport-as-America notion. According to this reading, national security discourse is only tangentially related to the fact that airport security describes the way we live now. Rather, at the level of the imagination, the important thing is that writers seem increasingly willing to see airports as places in which people test and express their character and moral compass. Every lineup is an insult; every delay an indignity. It is the plausibility of this fancy that allows us to entertain the idea that what happens in an airport is symptomatic of what happens in the life of the nation more broadly.

And ironically, by coding the airport as a place where values and the conscience are tested, this discourse only makes it seems more appropriate to frisk America down as she nervously takes off her shoes and heads through the magnetometer - en route to a tryst in Des Moines with a Hummer, no doubt.

No Love

Prof. Fendrich’s series continues with a lot of judgment, some E. H. Gombrich, a little David Hume, but (Alas!) almost no love.

“Pushback”

This word caught my attention yesterday. I heard it about six times in five minutes on the news, referring to the cascade of objections and rejoinders volleying between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama through the media. Hyphenated, contracted or otherwise, the term seems to be equally useful as both a verb (”we’ve got to push back on the special interests”), and also as a noun (”we expect pushback on our customer relations policy”). In either case, the term really seems to capture something about how people express verbal and public conflicts nowadays. As such, it deserves a little scrutiny.

In the last year or so, pushback has drawn interest from columnists and bloggers eager to dig into its background. According to what I’ve been able to find, pushback is used as a military term (to “push-back” the enemy; to experience pushback) and it is also used in airports to describe what happens when one of those little cars on the tarmac “pushes back” your plane from the gate. William Safire even recalls a time when “pushback” was an adjective describing a feature in reclining chairs. Safire doesn’t seem to object to the new usage, but language bloggers do, based on their trademark objection that it is simply “not a real word in the dictionary,’ as if this fussy rectitude had profound bearing on the matter. Actually, pushback was indeed submitted to Merriam-Webster’s Open Dictionary last year. And it’s already in the Oxford English Dictionary, which notes that the term is also used in hockey to describe the backward pass with which game play begins.

I’d like to highlight a couple of properties and complications about this word and its usage. As in my posts “Ties,” “Tasers” and “Under the bus,” here I’m interested in how a word’s usage possesses dynamics that stretch, loosen or rigidify the written and argumentative constructions in which it appears. These dynamics surely derive from both the term and also its context, which is an unstable variable that prevents us from establishing any hard and fast rules about meaning. But it is profitable to think these dynamics through, in order to develop a kind of perceptive reflection that allows us to approach even these suddenly trendy terms in useful and deliberate ways. This way of thinking also enables us to interrogate such neologisms for the curiously meaningful information that they yield about the society to which they are directed.

To begin with, it seems that the current usage of pushback is being driven by the aural media. I’ve noticed that some TV commentators seem to pause ever so slightly before they use the term, as if embarrassed, but they are certainly key popularizers of the word. Because of this mode of popularization, expect pushback to appear in writing and speech that is based on interviews and public comments - TV shows, biographies, news magazines, radio shows, political news writing, sermons, interviews, blogs, polemical books - anything that is based upon, sourced to, or otherwise derived from some sort of talk. By the same principle, this usage will probably not appear so often in writing on culture or the arts, in reviews, scholarship or in fiction. This uneven distribution is important because it ensures that the term will appear more often in public writing rather than in private or professional writing; it also ensures that one’s reaction to the term will be partly defined by the sorts of writing one regularly encounters.

This leads me to a second observation. It seems clear that critics of this usage are probably literary types who would be apt to dislike pushback because it replaces too wide an array of words that denote speech acts. This is perfectly true. Although pushback is always about conflict, there the commonality ends: here pushback means disagreement on the part of super-delegates in the current election; here it means to ignore the common wisdom about financial problems; here it means to issue a riposte in a financial negotiation; here, it means dissent from a ban on lead solder in the EU; here it means to retaliate against a person; here it means to refute a media narrative. Of course, many words have such elasticity. But when elastic words replace rigid ones, language watchers lament the loss of a preceding specificity, as this change seems to make writing less informative and more open to misunderstanding. For instance, to most intellectuals, “dissent” and “retaliation” are two very different acts, but the differences are erased if both are replaced by “pushback.” However, this objection is not terribly powerful because it ignores the reasons that people opt for less specificity. Writers often choose ambiguity because they aren’t sure about whether a statement is intended as dissent, retaliation or something else, so it is most accurate to employ a null term. This is not dastardly; it is simply erring on the side of caution. Moreover, there are in reality lots of readerships for whom a less specific characterization is perfectly adequate, and it is folly to ignore the audience entirely when we estimate where a given statement rests on some putative grade of denotative specificity.

Anyway, pushback has at least one more interesting dynamic that bears note here: it seems to request a partner, and yet in virtually no usage does the term coincide with what ought to be its natural spouse - “push.” Instead, when someone is insulted, they pushback; when someone’s argument is discredited, they pushback; when someone is lied to they pushback. Rarely, however, is someone actually pushed before they pushback. This is important because it frames the aggressive act using a very specific and illustrative term, while it frames the defender in very generic and blunt language. This makes the defensive act seem slow, imprecise, confused, even childlike. In this sense, pushback resembles the term “damage control” inasmuch as it presupposes that there is a bad state of affairs that can only be modestly ameliorated, never triumphed over or deflected.

Since so many different sorts of conflict are expressed by the term pushback, I think that this last issue is a little troubling. The usage of pushback makes it seem as if all conflicts and allegations - irrespective of their source, intent or the size and character of the constituency behind them - automatically have more truth, merit and force than the retaliations that they might engender. In this way, even specious attacks have an infantilizing effect upon those who they indict, and must be pushed back upon no matter what their content.

Pushback is a word for a society that imagines that sticks and stones may break your bones but words will always hurt you.

Love

Recently, artist and professor Laurie Fendrich has rekindled a smoldering pedagogical question by beginning a series of posts at the Chronicle of Higher Ed that proposes to “tackle the topic of aesthetic taste — what’s happened to it in the past couple of decades, whether or not we can, or ought, to teach it, and if so, how we can teach it.” That’s a biggie. As it turns out, Fendrich’s position appears to be that taste has gone downhill, and that by virtue of their expertise, professors can and ought to teach good taste to their students.

I have a great deal of sympathy for Fendrich’s position on this issue, and despite my reservations about her ideas, I admire the courage that it takes to broach this subject in the sometimes bilious environment of the blogosphere. However, both the post and its responses have become a little confused because of how Fendrich answers a key question at the heart of the project: what is teaching in this context? Here I offer a few reflections on how and where Fendrich has chosen to address this question, as a case study in how an argument can go astray when one of its basic conceptual components is defined only at an inopportune juncture in the prose.

Fendrich begins by noting that many students arrive at university with strongly held “tastes” about a number of things, including clothes, food and electronics. Students consider these tastes to be highly individualized, but they turn out to be fairly uniform because they derive from the media. The art museum seldom does much to shape students’ taste, and when it does, it usually leads adolescents to cliche art heroes such as Dali and Van Gogh. In light of these underconsidered choices, Fendrich does not hesitate to characterize students’ taste as “narrow and bad.” Of course the author admits that plenty of people - even academics! - have bad taste. She continues:

It’s said that there’s no accounting for taste, although I believe it’s often the case that it’s rather easy to account for it. Yes, taste may be subjective at its core, but that core is surrounded by a lot of reasons that very adequately explain why something is good or bad. There are many who would argue that because of the subjectivity of taste, it follows that no one, including a college teacher, has the right to challenge the taste of another person, including students.

But taking my cue from the wise David Hume (whom I’ll explore further in a future post), I see another side to taste. For all the impossibility of defining good taste, good taste tends to precipitate out over time and then solidify. “Say, that Manet painting sure is beautiful,” is almost as much a fact in its universal application as, “Water boils at 100 degrees Celsius.” In fact, good taste easily ossifies, which explains Martha Stewart. The idea that taste is radically subjective is an utterly inadequate explanation of aesthetic matters.

Billowy stuff. Fendrich finishes by proposing that although cultures mold many tastes, students can be shaped by good instructors, for: “just as bonsai trees owe their grownup state to the multiple causes of how they were planted, their particular container, the light, the wiring of their roots, the water and fertilizer and the clipping of their limbs, visual taste varies from culture to culture. Even so, all tastes, everywhere, are contingent on the quality of the “gardener.”

Note that this imagery echoes Raymond Williams’ famous entry about the word “culture” from his classic “Keywords.”  In this passage, Williams explains that since the 15th century, the usage of the term “culture” most often had to do with “the tending of natural growth,” usually referring to crops. Only later did the term accrue some of the artistic, literary and political meanings with which we use it today. Whether it is intentional or not, this allusion is important. But let’s bracket this allusion for a moment.

Since Fendrich posted her comments, several respondents have swiftly replied with critiques ranging from diatribes on the author’s elitism to sympathies for her experience, and (of course) diatribes about the diatribes. Because her blog is for Chronicle readers, much of the discussion has been professors writing about the merits of their own personal taste, assessing whether it is “good” or “bad” according to what they take to be Fendrich’s hierarchy, whether or not that hierarchy - or any hierarchy - has value. In fact, the criticism became so extensive that Fendrich has chosen to alter her plans, using a second post to reply to her critics rather than proceeding with the second stage of her exploration (presumably, Hume).

Given the vitriol of the response, the author uses her second post “to address the question of why I presume to teach taste to my students.” Fendrich then reconfigures the issues that her respondents raised into an argumentatively helpful form

When it comes to art, the questions really are, Why are college art professors so afraid to convey to their students that they have superior taste?, and, Why are they afraid to teach that taste to their students? Teaching good taste is a thoroughly democratic invitation to young art students to join the club of art-lovers by teaching them to become passionate about—rather than merely “knowledgeable” about—art.

Notice this new theme about love and passion. Fendrich’s post goes on to argue that many people really do have an impulse to form hierarchical judgments in spite of the common belief that the study of art has to do with simply teaching students the context in which a work was produced. Fendrich calls the latter “relativism,” a phenomenon that belies how many professors really think about art. She continues:

To those professors, I ask this: “Why teach Velázquez at all, if you don’t love him and don’t think he’s truly great? Just because he made the history books?”

No wonder so many students fall asleep in art history classes! If a professor doesn’t love the art, if a professor doesn’t reveal to the students that he or she thinks the art is great, or conversely, think it’s grotesque, the presentation is no more than dessicated information that places art “within the context in which it was produced.” Professors like this live in the land of Nietzsche’s living dead, and their students will surely sense it. Yes, yes, I’m sure these students will do well on the outcomes assessment examinations that will eventually come their way, testing their true “knowledge” of art.

But guess what? They’ll never learn what it is to love a great work of art.

The emphasized language reflects a theme about teaching that had been totally absent from the original post. It seems clear that for Fendrich, the purpose of teaching taste is to reveal to students what the teacher loves, in the hopes that the student will learn to love great works of art as well. I’m not sure that I agree with this proposition, but it is a strong one, and a concept that we would have done well to know at the outset.

Had we known at the outset that the aim of teaching taste was to imbue affection, readers would have had little cue to unleash by their curt responses to the very notion of hierarchical taste. This definition of teaching would shift discussion from canons of inherent aesthetic value (Dali bad; Velazquez good), to a canon of emotional value (Dali not lovable; Velazquez lovable), which seems a vastly more interesting idea. As a result of this shift, it wouldn’t matter whether or not professional artists and critics can morally or intellectually claim superior taste. Instead, all that Fendrich would have to prove is that these professionals have some claim on superior expertise about how to love art. I think that this is a stronger and more original idea - but only if we accept this definition of teaching taste, a definition that these readers desperately need at the beginning in order to really assimilate and assess this exploration.

One final point: earlier, I noted that Fendrich channeled Raymond Williams’ old (but still wondrously useful) idea that culture is attached to cultivation, the raising of seeds to maturity. It is also clear that she believes in teaching as a way to help grow a sensibility in the young. Elsewise, why self-describe as a “gardener?” There is a piece of this argument that has to do with helping the young use the art museum as they grow and mature into fully-developed aesthetic judges, otherwise known as adults. I hope that we hear more about this idea: that art professors can help young students learn to love images maturely.

And we have yet to hear from Hume.

The Hortatory Subjunctive

Lurita A. Doan steps down as Administrator of the U.S. General Services Administration. Language Log has a very interesting post concerning a debate about tense that Doan once had with members of the House Oversight Committee. Here is a real exchange between Doan and Rep. John Yarmuth (D-KY), presided over by Henry Waxman (D-CA):

REP. YARMUTH: In relation to questioning that Mr. Tierney engaged in with you, you talked about this statement that you made — “Until extensive rehabilitation of their performance occurs, they will not be getting promoted and will not be getting bonuses or special awards or anything of that nature” — I have two questions.
One is that you said sometimes you have a problem with tense, and basically there are only three tenses.
MS. DOAN: That — no. That’s not true. Okay, I’m –
REP. YARMUTH: Past, present and future.
MS. DOAN: No, there’s like present perfective. There’s present progressive, past progressive, past — (laughter) –
REP. YARMUTH: Yes, but in the time continuum — that’s grammar — but in the time continuum, there are only — it either happened, it is happening, or it will happen.
MS. DOAN: Or it’s ongoing as we talk.
REP. YARMUTH: I’m trying to get a handle on exactly where the issue of tense might relate to whether or not you actually were speculating about what you might do, what you may have in fact done, or what you were in the process of doing.
MS. DOAN: Well, I thought I was using like a hortatory subjunctive right there in which –
REP. YARMUTH: Okay.

As you can imagine, this dog-and-pony show goes on for some time. Language Log’s Mark Liberman explains the problem succinctly:

The committee’s jocular discussion blurs the distinctions between morphosyntax (facts about linguistic form), semantics (relations between language and the world), and pragmatics (how people use language to affect others). Rep. Yarmuth tries to clarify things (”that’s grammar — but in the time continuum, there are only — it either happened, it is happening, or it will happen”) but the proceedings continue to confuse references to the form, meaning, and effect of her statements.

Apparently, Yarmuth’s mother was a Latin teacher.

Vesuvius

The DaD series on handwriting continues. In the above page from an 1887 diary, Frederick Douglass visits Pompeii during his travels. The whole diary is available online from the Library of Congress.

“Under the Bus”

Newsweek has an interesting comment on the use of the phrase “to throw under the bus.” The expression is both evocative and totally weird. Is it a city bus, or a school bus? Is it moving? Why use the definite article instead of the indefinite article - “the” bus instead of “a” bus?

According to William Safire, this phrase was once popularized by Cyndi Lauper, and it may have originally been an expression used by minor league baseball teams while on tour. But it is anyone’s guess why the usage had suddenly become so common, with even political figures throwing their associates “under the bus” just because they disagree on something and say so. Personally, I started noticing this usage first on reality shows - Top Model, Top Chef, Project Runway - in which to be accused of throwing another under the bus is dire censure indeed, especially at judging table.

Not that I watch those shows.

Luxuries

Lately a number of writers have begun to mark the 30^th anniversary of the TV series “Dallas.” Of course, someone had to spoil the party by being too serious about it: Nick Gillespie, an editor at Reason, has published a piece in the Washington Post claiming that the “Dallas” phenomenon had a “shockingly unremembered” part to play in the “long twilight struggle between communism and capitalism.”

Sure. Yes. What?

I take it as self-evident that the thesis is intended to be impish. But the essay interests me because it is a fine example of how to manufacture a sense of substantiality to a claim that lacks meaningful evidence. The heart of this strategy lies in how Gillespie arrays several successive versions of his hypothesis.

To begin with, although Gillespie wants to claim that D. helped end the Cold War, these are not the words that he puts on the page at the outset. Instead, he claims that D. was simply a “turning point” in the conflict; it had a “part to play,” it was “important.” These are patently weak statements. So long as Gillespie does not specify any of these issues, the claim seems acceptable. And now that we have already agreed with the prose once, we are likely to continue reading.

The claim changes in the second paragraph. Here, Gillespie says that D. “shook the world” - an ironic allusion to Ten Days That Shook the World, John Reed’s classic account of the Russian Revolution. Gillespie gets us smiling with the gag, but although humor has put us on his side, we may doubt that the show truly had ramifications on a scale of those of 1917. To reduce this doubt, Gillespie follows up by claiming that plenty of foreigners indeed found the show “irresistible,” so the “shake the world” idea may have something to it after all.

In this way, the prose gets its reader to concede after a moment of doubt, which is an important way to build trust. These moves reduce our expectation that the author is misleading us, which is a good way of priming us to be misled.

Only after this trust-building work do we begin to see stronger, above-board claims: in paragraph four, D. becomes “an atmosphere-altering cultural force” that “helped define the 1980s as a glorious “decade of greed,” ushering in an era in which capitalism became cool, even though weighted with manifold moral quandaries,” and “created a new archetype of the anti-hero we loved to hate and hated to love.”

Of course, all alone these claims are internally poor. “Atmosphere” and “cultural force” are extremely hard to gauge rigorously. The 1980’s would have been the “decade of greed” even without “Dallas” (what about “Wall Street?”). And I doubt that the society of “The Godfather” and “Taxi Driver” was unfamiliar with anti-heroes. For that matter, it’s a little nuts to say that we introduced such characters to the nation of Pushkin, Turgenev, Gogol and Dostoyevsky.

However, all of these claims seem more reasonable because Gillespie took his time before revealing them. Instead of placing them at the beginning, where readers have a high degree of skepticism, Gillespie offered them at a juncture in the text in which doubt has been first manufactured and then removed. In this way, Gillespie makes these claims more likely to be conceded, irrespective of their natural merits.

Another example of this positioning takes place later on in the piece, when Gillespie pivots from the international implications of D. to its impact on domestic politics. He writes:

It would be too much to say that the show made the rise of George W. Bush possible, but it’s certainly the case that “Dallas” helped shift the center of American culture from the right and left coasts to the great cowboy middle, decentralizing the traditional sources of power elites in social and political terms.

So it would be “reaching” to say that Dallas affected one election, but far more moderate and reasonable to say that it remade the long-term firmament of American politics? Of course, the second claim is way more powerful than the first, but the manner in which Gillespie relates them makes it seem otherwise.

The lesson here is that preposterous claims can be made to seem more reasonable by positioning them strategically. Indeed, this policy continues throughout the essay. By the fifth paragraph, we are asked to believe that by virtue of watching the show, people in Warsaw Pact countries “came to believe that they, too, deserved cars as big as boats and a swimming pool the size of a small mansion.” Of course, we have no evidence to think that this is the case. All this is speculation. But once such speculation becomes the standard, it is easy to let all standards slip. By the seventh paragraph, the author quotes Larry Hagmen, who played J.R. Ewing, as if he were a keen political scientist:

“I think we were directly or indirectly responsible for the fall of the [Soviet] empire,” Hagman told the Associated Press a decade ago. “They would see the wealthy Ewings and say, ‘Hey, we don’t have all this stuff.’ I think it was good old-fashioned greed that got them to question their authority.”

Next, Gillespie posits that Dallas showed Romanians a “luxuriant alternative to communism.” This comment is pretty derogatory. Prior to Dallas, how could the poor benighted Romanians even conceive of luxury? The implication is that the Romanians were unthinking partisans to a dogmatic party line, unable to even imagine other ways of life, and would not have risen up against regimes that oppressed, mistreated and murdered them. At least not without watching “Dallas” first. This analysis really makes the Romanians seem like pawns in their own liberation.

Of course, there is one final version of the main claim: a notion that the lust for luxury is a motive force in history; that this lust can be mobilized and fomented in irresistible ways; that this lust is not only good, but universally so. It is an extreme belief dormant beneath a banal argument. Notice how this belief is made plain in the last paragraph:

At the same time, “Dallas” functioned as an update on Benjamin Franklin’s “Autobiography,” giving jes’ plain folks a step-by-step guidebook to how things really worked – and stoking them with the desire for all the baubles once only enjoyed by the country-club crowd. In demystifying wealth production — and pouring enough sex, scandal and whiskey to drown communism here and abroad — “Dallas” arguably stimulated our domestic political economy every bit as much as the Reagan-era tax cuts.

Some people may believe that desire for wealth is what ended the cold war, but fewer people really believe that desire for wealth is “the way the world works” in every circumstance. By dribbling this idea through two loose sentences, Gillespie successfully makes this deep version of his claim seem less radical than it is.

To sum up, then, here’s the entire sequence of claims that Gillespie makes:

D was an important turning point

D “shook the world,” and people loved watching it

D promoted a decade of greed and anti-heroism

D made people in Warsaw Pact countries want big cars and mansions

D was directly or indirectly responsible for the fall of the Soviet Union

D transformed the American political landscape

D showed us how the world really works, which is through lust for luxury.

Notice that each one of these claims is stronger and more contentious than the one that preceded it, as the stakes of the argument become greater and greater. This structure represents one way to lead a reader along the garden path. By the time that we get to the end, the reader will have conceded more than he or she expected to concede at the outset, and will not have noticed that the actual evidence is poor, inappropriate or absent.

Stability

Darwin’s first recorded doubt about the “stability of species” from his notebook. See more of Darwin’s handwriting at this new Darwin Online archive.

I’ll keep posting images of handwriting from time to time, as a regular feature of this blog.

Gobbledygook

The House passes Bill H.R. 3548 , The Plain Language in Government Communications Act of 2008. The New Republic has an amusing anecdote about Jeff Flake (R-AZ), the lone dissenter in the House.

Here’s what sponsor Bruce Braley (D-IA) has to say about the Bill:

Anyone who has done their own taxes knows the headache of trying to understand pages and pages of confusing forms and instructions. There is no reason why the Federal Government can’t write tax documents and other public documents in language we can all understand.

Writing government documents in plain language will increase government accountability and will save Americans time and money. Plain, straightforward language makes it easy for taxpayers to understand what the Federal Government is doing and what services it’s offering.

Small businesses will also see substantial benefits by eliminating Federal gobbledygook. Small businesses often have limited resources and are forced to hire lawyers and outside consultants to navigate the maze of Federal paperwork and convoluted language.

[...]

The Plain Language in Government Communications Act will require the Federal Government to write new publications, forms and publicly distributed documents in a clear, concise, well organized manner that follows the best practices of plain language writing.

I have in my hand the Plain Language Handbook that’s already being used by the Securities Exchange Commission, along with the Federal Plain Language guidelines which were adopted under another plain language initiative that began under President Clinton. These guidelines make it clear that the ultimate purpose of any communication from the Federal Government should be to reach the intended audience, the constituents and citizens of this country, in language they can understand and act upon.

Using complex language in government forms, letters, notices and instructions imposes unnecessary hardships on citizens. Replacing complex language with plain language will improve services to the public, save time agencies spend answering questions about what documents mean, and make it easier to hold government agencies accountable for their work.

Back in the 1930’s, It was in fact another Congressman, Maury Maverick of Texas, who coined the term “gobbledygook” to criticize bureaucratic jargon. Maverick’s efforts to eliminate this jargon came to nothing - and so will Braley’s attempt today.

There are at least two reasons why efforts like this fail. First of all, “simplicity” is not an obvious set of attributes inherent in language, and what counts as simple for the Securities and Exchange Commission manual (available here) may not count as simple in all letters, forms, notices and instructions that pass between citizens and their government. Indeed, the SEC book is so directly tailored to meet the needs of investors that virtually none of its rigid proscriptions are germane to the writing challenges faced by personnel in the IRS, Post Office, HUD, Veteran’s Affairs or any of the other myriad government offices. In other words, simplicity is not as simple as it sounds - its attributes vary depending on the writer, reader and situation.

Secondly, in his effort to make language simpler, Braley doesn’t bother to ask why language got complex in the first place. Take the tax example. It is true that tax instructions are indecipherable. But indecipherable to whom and why? Tax language is complex because taxation is complex. The difficulty arises because people steeped in this complexity need to communicate it to those who are not. It is a situation in which language will necessarily become convoluted because experts tend to use trade terms and shorthands that their readers will not be immediately familiar with.

The same is true for any situation in which a highly professionalized system of understandings encounters a mass audience with little background in that system. Unless we start from this discrepancy, it is unreasonable to expect that we might reduce confusion. A more productive approach might be to begin by identifying the most common miscommunications that arise between particular government organs and the citizens they interact with. This way, we won’t focus on creating naturally “plain” constructions, but will instead concentrate on how to think about simplicity in given situations, thereby building skills rather than just setting rules for how to use conditionals or choose typeface.

The truth is that words aren’t just naturally “plain” or “gobbledygook.” These adjectives describe reactions that are produced by contexts and real people, not by properties within words themselves.

Crazy

About Paul Auster’s op-ed today in The New York Times. This is an “emperor’s new clothes” moment for me. I’ve admired the sheer stylishness of Auster’s writing for many years. But it’s difficult to see a sophisticated and careful writer behind the prose of this indulgent and sloppy “memory-piece.”

It’s hard to read, not because I thought Auster was terrific, but because I thought he was cool. Here’s an example of how cool people don’t start out articles, even nostalgic ones:

It was the year of years, the year of craziness, the year of fire, blood and death. I had just turned 21, and I was as crazy as everyone else.

Oh, boy.

As the article continues, we learn that Auster was “crazy” in 1968 because “being crazy struck me as a perfectly sane response to the hand I had been dealt” as a potential draftee who just wanted to drink beer and write poetry in New York. So, because he was “crazy, crazy with the poison of Vietnam in my lungs,” Auster went to a demonstration where people “vented their craziness” by demonstrating against a new gymnasium at Columbia. After getting fired up, this “a throng of crazy, shouting students” marched out to tear down a construction fence - “a crazy, destructive act.” A few days later Auster was both “crazy and proud” when a policeman stepped on his hand (ouchie!) in the course of an antiwar sit-in.

Of course, those crazy days are long gone. But fear not, says Auster: “I sit alone in this room with a pen in my hand, I realize that I am still crazy, perhaps crazier than ever.”

Sure.

Okay, I’m being a little nasty. I’ll let others measure the gravity of Auster’s symbolic political act. But let’s take a moment to marvel at how deeply embarrassing this prose feels: can anyone self-characterize as “wild and crazy” and not sound foolish? It’s a bit like trying to convince somebody that you were popular in high school - the more you try to prove it, the less likely it seems that you really were popular in high school.

Anyone who thinks otherwise is clearly … ah … nuts.

Don’t [Tase?] Me, Bro.

One of the elegances of English is how easily it allows you to turn a noun into a verb and vice versa.

We took a flight.

We flew.

The doctors examined the patient.

The doctors performed an examination of the patient.

Notice that both nouns and verbs denote actions accurately. At the uchicago writing program, we spend a lot of time dealing with how to choose which form works better for a given reader - the verb or its “nominalization,” which is a fancy way of saying an “action word” in noun form.  The choice can be tricky. For instance, in the second example, a patient would probably find the first version clearer, because it shows an action in verb form, and it is easy to picture a doctor in the act of examining. However, a nurse would probably find the second version clearer, because for him or her “an examination” is a technical thing made up of many actions; more importantly nurses are probably used to reading this action as a noun on a day to day basis.

Anyway, that’s a simplistic take on what can be a complicated rhetorical choice. However, the complexity of this choice rests entirely on the fact that it is possible to write an action as either noun or verb in the first place. This interchangeability is the heart of choosing (or not choosing) clarity for different readers in different situations.

With this in mind, consider this post from John McIntyre at the Baltimore Sun’s language blog. McIntyre’s reader asks him about the past tense of the verb form of taser - is it “tasered” or “tased?” McIntyre replies:

Use either Tasered or Tased in published or broadcast material, and you will very likely get a lawyer letter informing you that TASER is a registered trademark of TASER International and is not to be used at all as a verb, or, for that matter, as a noun except in reference to the products of TASER International. The letter may also suggest that you use the little trademark symbol with TASER. Generic references to an electronic stunning device are acceptable. Go and sin no more.

I’m no lawyer.  I don’t know if there’s any basis in the law for banning verb forms of a noun.  But if McIntyre is right, and Taser International is allowed to decide that the name may NEVER UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES be used as a verb, then the writer who wants to do so is forced to use the verb “stun.”

Thus,

The policeman used a club on the suspect.

The policeman clubbed the suspect.

But,

The policeman used a Taser on the suspect.

The policeman stunned the suspect.

The moment that the device is engaged, the Taser suddenly loses its name, and the company disassociates itself from the results of using their product. There is an interesting lineage behind this idea, and it also has to do with electricity. During the early years of electrification, when George Westinghouse’s AC power was competing with Thomas Edison’s DC form, Edison called lethal electrocution “westinghousing,” in order to associate his rival with the deadly process. Edison’s effort to promote this verb was not successful, but the strategy was smart.

Another way of looking at this is to say that Taser is following a pattern for many makers of weaponry. When someone is shot (as 32 people were in my city last weekend) we don’t say they got colted or glocked. On the other hand, plenty of companies love it when we turn their products into verbs. In Britain, “to hoover” means to use a vacuum of any kind, my television tells me “to swiffer” instead of sweeping, and we all know how “to google” something or someone.

It might be possible to assemble a list of the types of trademarks that “want to be” used as both nouns and verbs, and another list of those for which only the noun is allowed. Such a list might illuminate marketing strategies and show which companies feel that they need to downplay their association with their own product at the instant in which that product is used. This list might also say something about the impact of trademarking on English: we are inventing a field of nouns that must for legal reasons be substituted with an entirely different word before becoming a verb; these rules rigidify constructions that might otherwise be fluid.

Misspoke

Hendrik Hertzberg has a quick and dirty archeology of the word “misspoke” in The New Yorker. The article is not really exceptional, but Hertzberg distinguishes himself by calling attention to an interesting fact: as one of its samples of how people use “to misspeak,” The OED offers a statement from none other than Richard Nixon’s press secretary Ron Zeigler in 1973 - a year that Hertzberg sharply calls the “annus mirabilis of the Classical period of American misspeaking.”

Hah! Good times.

UPDATE: Also, pop over to NYRB and catch Tony Judt using the word “mis-memory” to characterize the current tendency to “wear the last century rather lightly.”

“Ties”

Yesterday, I meditated a little on the degree to which a speaker is implicated in the words of another person. I argued that to ascertain this implication, it is helpful to measure the extent to which the words of others appear in the speaker’s voice, and to make some effort to learn the manner in which those words got in.

Bakhtin is helpful on this because he offers one way to figure out the manner in which words are assimilated - as “authoritative discourses” or “internally persuasive discourses.” If the assimilation is the former, then we can expect that the absorbed discourse carries with it the beliefs of its original author. If the assimilation is the latter, then odds are the speaker has rewritten the words to the degree that it diminishes any strong ideological implication with the beliefs of the original writer.

The model is surely imperfect, but it is useful because even if we bicker about what counts as “authoritative” or “persuasive,” we will in any event be bickering over the right issue.

Anyway, in the discussion, I ignored an important aspect of the question as I framed it in the post,

The first question is: to what extent are we bound up in the actions of our associates, and how close does the associate have to be so that we share his or her culpability ?

I skipped the emphasized portion because it’s a bit beyond the ambit of this blog. However, in the last few days a lot of commentary has taken place that makes it worthwhile to revisit the issue of how to describe the closeness of an association.

Specifically, my interest has to do with the noun “Ties.” As the news cycle continues, more and more writers use this word to frame relationships, asking about Barack Obama’s “ties” to William Ayers. We hear this word a lot in political journalism, because it has curious problems and powers.

First of all, it is extraordinarly vague. People have ties to their hometowns, their neighbors, their spouses, their coworkers, and not all of these relationships are identical or politically meaningful in every context. The plural form of the noun helps add to this vagueness: you’ll notice that in nine out of ten usages, a NFL hero has “Ties” to the local high school, just as a disgraced councilman has “Ties” to an indicted businessman. This conveys the impression that even if one tie is clear, there may be others that are tantalizingly vague.

This leads me to the second property: the word really plays on the imagination. That’s what makes it sexy. A few months ago, when The New York Times and The Washington Post published stories about Sen. John McCain’s professional meetings with lobbyist Vicki Iseman, the term “Ties” was used with a pretty obvious double meaning, especially by the Post. Indeed, in the context of discussions of lobbying, notice how conventionally the suggestive adjective “cozy” slides next to the word “Ties,” thereby enhancing the insinuation so that the allegation easily seems more lurid than the evidence behind it.

But the word “Ties” is not only nettlesome because it is vague and tends to play on the imagination. The term also exploits asymmetries of information. In the months building up to the war, there was much discussion of the “Ties” between Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda. Of course, any collaboration has been thoroughly discredited. The trouble is that even though the term “Ties” really has little inherent meaning, it sometimes seems like it has a specific definition as a technical word. Some people might have imagined that our intelligence experts had some test that must be met before an association counts as a “Tie.” Unfortunately, we learned there there is no such test, or rather, that the test was so absurdly minimal as to be useless. It is indeed true that Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was physically in Iraq. But that’s about all. This coincidence seems to be the only specificity needed to claim a “Tie” by analysts. By this weak standard, billions of people have ties to terrorists, since terrorists walk the same streets and breathe the same air as politicians, dog-groomers, duchesses, waitresses and goat-herders in nations all around the globe. More deeply, the problem is that the existence of a test is not just unknown, but unknowable, and so “Ties” becomes a means to deny us the information necessary to make sound judgments.

Vague, seductive to the imagination, disguising asymmetrical information: it sure sounds as if “Ties” are pretty crummy. But this analysis is mere snobbery until we acknowledge that writers have all kinds of pretty good reasons to use the word. Here are a few:

1) Like all vague words, “Ties” helps people avoid mistakes. It is useful if you can’t remember who William Ayers is, if you think that there is more to the Iseman story that hasn’t come out yet, if you took bad notes and you can’t figure out whether A is B’s best friend or neighbor. “Ties” is a good word for writers who are more worried about making a mistake than they are about perfection - this is the state of a journalist and editor as they rush to publish. Vagueness can at least provide some weak accuracy where precision is impossible and time is short.

2) Like all words that play on the imagination, “Ties” allows even prestigious news organizations to publish lurid material that they cannot say explicitly if they hope to maintain their credibility. Although this is often unethical and silly, it is not a type of writing that we ought to ban completely if we truly have the public interest - broadly construed - in mind.

3) In reality, had the intelligence services been working with a clear and meaningful set of categories, then there would be no problem with their use of the word “Ties.” So long as the term has technical properties that make it useful in the professional conversation, then the intelligence services could still maintain the asymmetries of information that make their work possible. The problem in the Saddam example is that there needs to be a way to mark technical designations off from nontechnical ones for the public. Although this is not what happened in 2002, that is not to say that it could not happen in future instances.

So if (when) you read that Obama has “Ties” to Ayers, the odds are that the writer is not a scumbag. Instead, it is probably because the writer: 1) doesn’t really know what the relationship is, and is on deadline 2) feels like something fishy is going on, but wants you to fill in the blanks until more of the story breaks 3) is parroting a designation that some other group has already made, a designation that may or may not derive from an identifiable set of criteria.

As a matter of contextualized rhetoric, the most remarkable thing about “Ties,” (or rather its common usage) is that the very properties that make the word suspicious to a reader are identical with the properties that make it useful to a writer. This situation is not unique, but it is uncommon.

Spreadeagled

I do a lot of research into advertising trade publications from the mid 20th century. I came across this quote in an issue of Advertising Age from 1938. Speaking to a group of his peers, General Mills executive Walter Barry was explaining how successfully radio advertising has helped to hawk one of his key products:

The pores of the radio audience are pretty well opened for a little sales talk after a few doses of romance or song. As a result Wheaties has spreadeagled the breakfast food field in eight years.

Scholars hate phrases like these because mixed metaphors are usually the result of sloppy thinking and they almost always confuse the reader. That said, they’re still fascinating. This one is especially so: by combining imagery of skin care, narcotics, violent sex and food, Barry communicates the psyche of the advertiser more succinctly than a dozen annual reports.

I imagine a room full of small sweaty little salesmen in tube socks, tweed and yesterday’s shirtcollars, watching Barry brag at a lectern while each conniving to spreadeagle their own cigarette smokers, bromoseltzer drinkers and regular consumers of ironized yeast.

Flimsy

Watching ABC’s Democratic debate (transcript) last night, I was struck by the degree to which Sen. Obama was being defined by his associations, a process that has been taking place ever since the Jeremiah Wright story broke a few weeks ago. Last night, Obama had already become frustrated with this when George Stephanopoulos brought up Obama’s slight acquaintance with William Ayers, a former Weatherman:

SEN. OBAMA: George, but this is an example of what I’m talking about. This is a guy who lives in my neighborhood, who’s a professor of English in Chicago, who I know and who I have not received some official endorsement from. He’s not somebody who I exchange ideas from on a regular basis.

And the notion that somehow as a consequence of me knowing somebody who engaged in detestable acts 40 years ago when I was 8 years old, somehow reflects on me and my values, doesn’t make much sense, George.

The fact is, is that I’m also friendly with Tom Coburn, one of the most conservative Republicans in the United States Senate, who during his campaign once said that it might be appropriate to apply the death penalty to those who carried out abortions.

Do I need to apologize for Mr. Coburn’s statements? Because I certainly don’t agree with those either.

So this kind of game, in which anybody who I know, regardless of how flimsy the relationship is, is somehow — somehow their ideas could be attributed to me — I think the American people are smarter than that. They’re not going to suggest somehow that that is reflective of my views, because it obviously isn’t.

Under a microscope, the analogy falls apart. William Ayers is being characterized by acts, while Sen. Coburn is being characterized by statements. I should say that I don’t think that Obama is beyond the pale on this, because in political contexts the word often is the deed, and it is not surprising to see a politician confuse two activities that are usually separate in most other circumstances. Besides, I’ve read Obama’s writing and I’ve met him once or twice; I just don’t buy the notion that he’s underhanded in his rhetorical choices.

In any case, I think that it is a useful exercise to parse this issue because there are at least two important questions - both linked by a common variable - that we can tease out of Obama’s response. The first question is: to what extent are we bound up in the actions of our associates, and how close does the associate have to be so that we share his or her culpability ? The second question is: to what extent are we answerable for the words of our associates, and, again, how close does the associate have to be for us to have responsibility? Obviously, both of these questions