Stop making excuses for unclear writing

It’s not political resistance (Judith Butler) or metaphysical liberation (Ellie Anderson): it’s just bad.

Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers.

—George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language”

Is it good to write clearly?

I would have thought that the answer is obviously yes, at least for analytical writing. Ambiguity is nice for poetry and crosswords, and obscurity works for mystics and ciphers. But if you’re giving arguments, your goal should be to make yourself understood. There is simply no way to do that without writing clearly. The audience should be able to understand—with a minimum of toil and guesswork—what your words mean and how your ideas fit together.

And yet, some authors contend that there is nothing wrong with writing unclearly, insisting that it is confused or consumerist—perhaps even politically oppressive—to expect clear expression from intellectuals. One recent piece even calls clarity a “fetish.”

At the risk of sounding freaky, I’d like to defend the demand for clear writing, starting with its most infamous nemesis.

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Round 1: Butler vs. Nussbaum

Photo credit: Collier Schorr.

Judith Butler, author of the influential Gender Trouble, has become a punchline among the discontents of “French theory” for their murky, clunky prose.¹ The best hitpiece remains Martha Nussbaum’s “The Professor of Parody.” Butler’s writing is so obscure, so relentlessly indecipherable, that the unclarity can’t be a fluke, says Nussbaum. It must have some deeper purpose. One such purpose may be to present the author as an indispensable guru, on whom the pathetic readers must continually rely:

When ideas are stated clearly, after all, they may be detached from their author: one can take them away and pursue them on one’s own. When they remain mysterious (indeed, when they are not quite asserted), one remains dependent on the originating authority. The thinker is heeded only for his or her turgid charisma. One hangs in suspense, eager for the next move.

Unclear prose can also create an illusion of depth and importance:

When Butler’s notions are stated clearly and succinctly, one sees that, without a lot more distinctions and arguments, they don’t go far, and they are not especially new. Thus obscurity fills the void left by an absence of a real complexity of thought and argument.

What does Butler say in response? While their 1999 preface to Gender Trouble doesn’t mention Nussbaum by name, it does push back against the clarity scolds. Butler’s main argument is that writing clearly is a kind of conformity. You can’t say anything subversive unless you subvert linguistic convention. As Butler puts it,

neither grammar nor style are politically neutral. Learning the rules that govern intelligible speech is an inculcation into normalized language, where the price of not conforming is the loss of intelligibility itself. (xix)

This non sequitur is so brazen as to be insulting. Yes, you have to follow the rules of a language in order to make yourself understood. You can’t expect other people to follow you if you’re speaking pure gibberish or secret codewords. But Butler says almost nothing to connect this banal linguistic truth to politics. They do go on to say (without argument) that radical ideas require radical constructions, beyond the “subject-verb requirements” of everyday syntax:

It would be a mistake to think that received grammar is the best vehicle for expressing radical views, given the constraints that grammar imposes upon thought, indeed, upon the thinkable itself. (xix)

But this claim is implausible, again to the point of insult. If clear language can express the propositions that make up common sense, then it can also negate those propositions. Just add a “not” to a conventional maxim and you get a radical one. There is not an objective external world revealed by science. Language does not represent an independently existing reality. The moon is not not made of cheese. Does Butler think these claims are part of common sense? Maybe they’re just tossing their objections off, and we’re not supposed to take them too seriously?

(I’m not even going to touch the “subject-verb” stuff, except to observe that Butler never gives a single example of something that can be stated only ungrammatically, nor do they fill their book with ungrammatical sentences despite their supposed value for radical politics. If you can believe it, when Butler decries subject-verb requirements, they themselves use a sentence with a subject and a verb. Is their idea not radical after all? What are we even doing here?)²

Butler’s other argument is that “clarity” can lower our guards, leaving us vulnerable to error and deceit.

Avital Ronell recalls the moment in which Nixon looked into the eyes of the nation and said, “let me make one thing perfectly clear” and then proceeded to lie. What travels under the sign of “clarity,” and what would be the price of failing to deploy a certain critical suspicion when the arrival of lucidity is announced? Who devises the protocols of “clarity” and whose interests do they serve? What is foreclosed by the insistence on parochial standards of transparency as requisite for all communication? What does “transparency” keep obscure?

Again, I am stunned by the poverty of arguments. Butler just tells a story and asks some vaguely ominous questions! Are we supposed to conclude, on the basis of zero evidence, that a nefarious cabal of powerful oppressors decides what is and isn’t clear communication? (Don’t we have some independent grip on linguistic features like ambiguity and complexity?) And why should the fact that foul dealers clothe themselves in a certain virtue irrevocably discredit that virtue? It’s a truism that everybody wants to look virtuous. For any virtue you like, there’s going to be some Nixonian figure who falsely claims to have it—should we conclude that there are no real virtues, after all? And in Nixon’s case, he’s not even talking about clear expression in the relevant sense. He wanted to make clear what happened—i.e. to definitively establish something as fact. That’s not the same as wanting to speak clearly. It’s possible to speak clearly without clarifying anything about what’s going on. “I plead the Fifth” is perfectly clear speech, but it usually doesn’t establish much.

In sum: I’m not impressed. There is probably some microscopic kernel of truth in Butler’s arguments, something akin to “you might have to use unconventional language to express certain unconventional ideas.” But there is just no persuasive critique here of clear language in general. Nor is there any good reason to think that all clear language must be a part of existing common sense. Mathematicians, scientists, and humanists are constantly coining new technical terms, and often their definitions are as lucid as you could want. It takes a minute to understand what “Möbius strips” and “continuous deformations” are, but that’s not because topologists are obscure writers. They’re using clear terms to talk about difficult concepts that go beyond common sense. If they can do it, why can’t Butler?

But even if Butler were right about the costs of clarity, their argument would still be woefully incomplete, since they don’t even once weigh those costs against the benefits of clarity. Readers have a legitimate interest in being able to understand what you’re saying. You can’t always make yourself accessible to everyone—a set theory textbook will demand more from readers than The Very Hungry Caterpillar. Still, it’s a sign of respect to write as clearly and succinctly as you can, so that no one has to waste their time deciphering the guru.

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Round 2: Bentham vs. Anderson

Why are we relitigating the Butler/Nussbaum clarity kerfuffle?

Well, a couple of weeks ago, Bentham's Bulldog put out “How Continental Philosophers ‘Argue’,” in which he accuses figures like Butler of (among other things) writing unclear prose. In response, Ellie Anderson wrote “Continental philosophy and the fetish for clarity,” in which she gives a neo-Butlerite plea for obscurity.³

I’ll be honest: “fetish for clarity” was like the Bat Signal for me. I knew I had to write this post.

So let’s go through Anderson’s arguments against the clarity fetish and see if they fare any better than Butler’s.

Anderson starts by asking why analytic philosophers, such as Bentham’s Bulldog, love clarity so much. By “analytic philosophers,” she means people like me, who work in the tradition of G.E. Moore and Bertrand Russell (among many others). The contrast is with “Continental philosophers” like her, who work in the tradition of Martin Heidegger and Michel Foucault (among many others). These categories are imperfect; there are plenty of people who sit uneasily between the two camps, as well enormous internal variation within each. But let’s struggle on.

Anderson claims that analytic philosophers love clarity because they mostly believe in the “correspondence theory of truth,” according to which truth is “a correspondence between a belief and an actual state of affairs.” She writes:

In much analytic philosophy, language is presumed to have a direct relation to beliefs and other states of mind: language transparently expresses states of mind. This means that language ideally should communicate as clearly as possible. Hence, the norm of clarity is taken in analytic philosophy as an obvious good.

Never mind that many analytic philosophers reject the correspondence theory. (Even Moore rejected it in 1899; he and Russell weren’t won over until 1910.) I just don’t see what metaphysics has to do with clear writing. Suppose I claim that Anderson’s piece is confused because it fails to align with the principal neo-Fregean tenets of analytic ratiocination. “That’s not a very clear objection,” she might say in her defense. “Aha,” I might retort, “but I reject the correspondence theory of truth! I’m not bound like you by the straitjacket of clarity.” Isn’t this obviously a bad justification? Why should my metaphysical theory of truth be a get-out-of-jail-free card for crimes against the English language?

Anderson continues:

However, thinkers such as Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Adorno point out that the dogma of clarity brings with it a host of philosophical assumptions that should be subjected to scrutiny—such as the correspondence theory of truth I mentioned above. In the essay “Skoteinos, or How to Read Hegel,” Adorno points out that clarity has in the twentieth century become autonomous from the philosophies in which it originated, most notably Descartes’. Descartes’ desire for clear and distinct ideas, taken from mathematics, trickled from philosophy into the natural sciences and has persisted there, only to trickle back into philosophy with the rise of positivism. Adorno writes, “the concept of clarity is taken from individual disciplines in which it has been preserved as dogma and reapplied to a philosophy that long ago subjected it to critical reflection and therefore ought not to have complied with it unquestioningly.”^[1] Under the pressures of logical positivism, analytic philosophy has fetishized clarity even as philosophy, at least beginning with Hegel, has provided ample reasons to be skeptical about it.

So far, this just amounts to “my favorite philosophers said you’re wrong.” At best, there’s an implicit claim that clarity belongs only in mathematics. (Why only there? Does the correspondence theory hold exclusively for numbers and shapes?)

Finally, we get to the real argument:

While continental philosophy is regularly accused of being unclear, this is often because the ideas propounded precisely rebel against the metaphysical assumptions that clear expression brings with it. As Adorno notes, Hegel disavows hypotactical writing in favor of parataxis: here, the structure of sentences undermines the hierarchy of clauses, as well as subjects and predicates.^[2] Instead, meaning emerges through the relation of clauses and sentences to one another. Adorno, too, employs paratactical writing in an effort to resist ‘identity thinking’ and the fetish of clarity.^[3]

This turns out to be a rerun of Butler with fancier words. Again, the key idea is that clear expressions depend on dubious “metaphysical assumptions,” and again it’s hard to see what these assumptions are meant to be.

Let me give some credit where it’s due, however: it’s legitimate to be skeptical of the implicit “metaphysics of natural language.” Even David Armstrong—an analytic metaphysician if there ever was one—was happy to critique the comfortable structure of subject and predicate. In A Theory of Universals, Armstrong says that sentences like “Kermit is green” have a grammar that suggests that properties sit outside of their bearers, as if Kermit were sitting down next to his greenness, instead of having the greenness inhering in him. A better grammar would express the same idea by writing out the name of the object in colored font!

(This is just one example of hundreds. No one in analytic philosophy thinks the nature of reality can be infallibly intuited from the syntax of English.)

But even if grammar can mislead the metaphysician, that tells us nothing about how to write well. There is just no intelligible relation whatsoever between the finer points of metaphysics and the actual business of writing. Note that Armstrong, battling the illusions conjured by ordinary grammar, was able to make his point in plain English. If you refuse on principle to make your point clearly, I am going to suspect that you don’t have a point, after all. If your theory of gender or of ideology is literally inexpressible in language that I can understand—or if it loses its plausibility when shorn of flourishes and ambiguities—that is not the fault of my language: it is the fault of your theory.

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Conclusion

Clear language has clear benefits: you get your point across in a way that respects the reader’s time and patience. The advantages of unclear language, meanwhile, remain obscure. At best, unclarity might be a necessary evil—something that is difficult to remove from exploratory work, while the ideas are still inchoate. (Better to see a new idea darkly than to see nothing at all.) In the end, when we weigh the benefits of clarity against its alleged costs, the choice is—let me check my thesaurus…—limpid.

There’s still one factor we haven’t explored, though: the costs of obscurity. It is rather amazing, when you think about it, that Butler is so skeptical of clear writing and yet so insouciant about unclarity—even though, prima facie, unclarity is by far more dangerous, with its obvious potential for deception and evasion. This may be an instance of the Iron Law of Edgelords: an academic gets famous by saying things that sound radical, not things that sound plausible.

So kudos to Bentham for a stimulating post, and also to Anderson for a reply that was, honestly (don’t take this the wrong way), pretty clear. Read Bentham for yourself if you want to know which of his objections land. I wouldn’t say he destroyed all of Continental philosophy with FACTS and LOGIC, but I will say this: if a Substack post by an analytic philosophy undergrad can land that many heavy blows on the titans of an intellectual tradition, that tells you something—both about the vices of that tradition and the value of analytic training.

If your response to “That’s unclear” is “Clarity is bad,” I hope you’ll reconsider. Give clarity a second chance, I say! It’s not such an oppressive imposition once you get to know it. It can be useful, amiable—even beautiful.

1. Not my phrase! Look at p. x, from Butler’s preface: “Gender Trouble is rooted in ‘French theory,’ which is itself a curious American construction.”

Speaking of tenth pages of Gender Trouble, p. 10 gets quoted in The Onion’s 2017 masterpiece, “Trump Voter Feels Betrayed By President After Reading 800 Pages Of Queer Feminist Theory,” starring a burly middle-aged white guy who looks like he just walked off the set of Mare of Easttown.

I like Trump, because I thought he tells it like it is. But you know who really tells it like it is? Judith Butler.

“…gender is not to culture as sex is to nature; gender is also the discursive/cultural means by which ‘sexed nature’ or ‘a natural sex’ is produced and established as ‘prediscursive,’ prior to culture, a politically neutral surface on which culture acts.”

If I had just known that back in November, I would have never voted for Trump. God…how could I have been so stupid?

2. An absurdly charitable reader of Butler might point to the phenomenon of presupposition, which sometimes makes it infelicitous to assert either a sentence or its negation. For example, “I stopped doing meth” and “I didn’t stop doing meth” both presuppose that I was doing meth. (I wasn’t.) But to justify Butler’s view, you’d need to find a presupposition that somehow couldn’t be singled out and denied, a kind of global presupposition in all of conventional language, impossible to clearly articulate and yet invaluable for radical politics. Good luck!

3. In the post, Anderson doesn’t cite Butler. But the post (which features some nonfunctional footnotes) is excerpted from an unpublished paper, which for all I know includes citations to the 1999 preface to Gender Trouble.