I suspect another differentiator is that of "secondary text". I don't look at critical theory as exclusively secondary, wholly in service to another, ostensibly primary, text, but rather as a text about ideas, aesthetics, language, with possibly another text or texts as a jumping off point. From my perspective, there seems to be a degree of subordination you expect of a secondary text; would I be correct in assuming that you would expect a good secondary text to be accessible to a competent reader of the primary text?
Before debating any further, let me just say that I appreciate all of the thoughtful responses. It's helping me to clarify my own feelings on the subject.
"Secondary text," I suppose, may not be the precise term I'm looking for. The way I'm dividing it, a primary text (e.g. a novel or a poem) is chiefly about itself, so that Lolita, for instance, is not chiefly about the nominal subject of an adult man's passion for a young girl, it's about the aesthetic experience that Nabokov crafts. A secondary text (e.g. a work of theory or criticism), on the other hand, is chiefly about something other than itself. Yet I don't mean this as narrowly as you might be taking it (and as the term itself might suggest, hence the need for a better term). I'm not trying to suggest that a secondary text necessarily have some one to one correlation with a given primary text. In the sense I mean it, Roland Barthes's S/Z, for instance, as a secondary text, is not chiefly about the nominal subject of Balzac's story "Sarrasine," nor is it chiefly about the aesthetic experience of reading Barthes, but rather it's chiefly about the codes by which we create meaning in a text.
So in this sense, I'm with you that I look to works of theory as texts "about ideas, aesthetics, language, with possibly another text or texts as a jumping off point." I do think that the further a theorist strays from concrete "jumping off points," the more likely abstract language will become necessary, but I don't see this as an excuse for obscurity. Rather the opposite, I'd say the more abstract one's subject, the greater the need to keep everything else concrete and clear. Also, the more complex the idea, the greater the need for simplicity of style. It seems to me that many theorists think differently than I do on this subject. Deleuze and Guattari, for instance. I have a love/hate relationship with their books, in that I enjoy them in much the same aesthetic sense that I might enjoy a Robert Anton Wilson novel. I know that the experience of reading it is part of their "message," but I still think that their ideas would be better served by a clearer, simpler writing style. So I suppose I also know what you mean when you write:
Another point I wish to make is that, for me, the style is often a part of the message; how a piece is written, how it encourages me to read, changes the way I think about it, even possibly shades meaning. If everything were written in a "clear", "simple" style, I'd become increasingly frustrated with the lack of available perspectives, and would, I suspect, become a lazier, more impoverished reader.
But as a reader, myself, I'm generally content to get my fill of complex stylings from novelists, and in theorists I tend to value a more transparent style. Also, Deleuze and Guattari can get away with obscurity, but so many second-rate academic writers try to cover up intellectual shallowness by carefully obscuring what they're saying that it's soured me on the experience of giving theorists the benefit of the doubt. So back to the question first posed by this thread, I think that the language of theory tends (quantitatively speaking) to be over-complicated, trying to dress up simple thoughts in complex language. There is also some good theory out there that is written in a complicated way. At least partially because of the fact that so much theory is over-complicated, though (as well as for the other reasons listed above), I personally tend to value theory that strives for clarity. |
