The triumph of "bad" writing

By Shelley Walia

MANY literary theoriticians have been amused and outraged to hear that the first prize for bad writing has gone to America’s foremost Marxist, literary, and cultural critic, Fredric Jameson, currently William Lane, Professor of Comparative Literature at Duke University. Indeed, it is not very easy to come to grips with Jameson’s rather complicated way of saying what he says. All issues, and there are many, are problematised by him, and so are the solutions. This kind of unconventional writing that speaks highly of Adorno’s "dialectical prose" tries to hint at doing away with easy solutions or familiar positions that could offer only false security and nothing more. His dialectical criticism is, therefore, apt for the large number of contemporary issues he would like to problematise. In such a style we can clearly decipher a postmodern leaning towards the inconclusive and the evasive. As J. Behar points out in his response to Michael Sprinker, "careless or sometimes deliberately crude writing registers one’s innocence, so to speak, one’s standing outside the charmed circle of those who inhabit the world of what used to be called belles-lettres".

It is this point which is missed by scientists like Alan Sokal who, through his essay in Social Text, a leading journal in the field of cultural studies, tried to mock the ideological pretensions of the postmodernists through his ‘farrago of deliberate solecisms, howlers, and nonsequiturs, stitched together so as to look good’. Both, what has now come to be famously known as the "Sokal Hoax’, and the recent award in the ‘Bad Writing Contest’ to Fredric Jameson and two other professors from English departments only goes to indicate a cynical lobby in the sciences gunning for literary studies which aims at developing into a more scientific discipline. Postmodern relativism or the practice whereby questions are suspended rather than answered, or Jameson’s own ‘resistance to thematisation’ are genuine issues taken up in the humanities and social sciences; the accusation that there is a collapse in standards of scholarship and intellectual responsibility smack of malice and academic narrow-mindedness.

Jameson sees the necessity of interpreting, but detests the whole exercise of it, and this would obviously irk many empiricists who regard theory as ‘sloppy, silly and self-indulgent’. Social Text editors or scholars like Jameson would never grant science, as stated by Michael Holquist, ‘the sufficient distinctiveness of their homogenising zeal’, especially in the dizziness of the contemporary unstable and shifting scene. The ‘tedious’ prose of Jameson all the more passionately dramatises the condition of the way we write and read, and in the final analysis, gives us the ambivalent satisfaction of enjoyment and dislike, a condition of ‘deferral-yet-renewal’, a feeling of ‘I-can’t-go-on-I’ll-go-on’. It must be clear that this is Jameson’s power as a writer, and not his weakness. Here lies the subversion of all totalisation or the resistance to intelligence which thwarts the ‘hermeneutic will-to-understand’ in an absurd world. Jameson’s deep-seated intention is to make less sense and force on his readers more difficulties. Making sense ‘typically means unmaking some oppressively familiar common, ideological kind of sense’, a type of fatal accommodation to the existing political order or the bourgeoisie.

More than ever it is now being realised how postmodernism has combined the revolutionary avant-garde with modernism to produce a genuine political critique in our time. The object of literary studies now stands radically transformed: existing academic disciplines and specialisations supported by the conservative traditionalists are challenged by making visible the ideological processes by which meaning is naturalised and "great works" fetishised as cultural artifacts. Apart from destabilising the canon, the pluralistic adoption of postmodern and post-structuralist theory has resulted in a strategic intervention into the conventional responses of recent changes in the humanities. The political centre of the academy is now reconstituting itself through coming to terms with "theory", thereby deconstructing the category of the bourgeois individual and his complicity with power arrangements along the lines of race, gender and class.

Postmodernism has gradually erased the nostalgia for the past and its recreation which the moderns long upheld, owing to the acceptance of contradictions within the historical process, the dialectics of which are as indifferent to the present as to the future and have no place for the sentiments associated to the past. Postmodernism has finally veered us to an understanding of a worldview where the "ultimate truth" or "absolute language" or "essential reality" become only illusions. There is no reality beyond that of the signs and no transcendental world which the modernists hankered after. All reality is an ideological mirage, as is clear from the working of the Soviet system, or any other discourse which gives rise to pseudo-realities constituted by a non-referential system of signs.

We can thus see how the transition from the modern to the postmodern is a shift from the super-reality principle to the pseudo-reality or the "hyper" which, however, characterises both the modern and the postmodern. And thus, there is the link which can never be wished away. Undoubtedly, both modernism and postmodernism give prominence to fragmentation but the moods differ substantially. The latter of course, does not promote nostalgia for an earlier age when, "faith was full and authority intact". Pound regretfully called his own major poem only a "rag-bag" as that was all that could be produced in the 20th century. In many ways, Eliot echoed his pessimism and a lament in the line from The Waste Land. "These fragments I have shored against my ruins". A "heap of broken images" from past literature and from human history can give only temporary sustenanace to the wasteland consciousness. The modernist, on the other hand, longs for the coherent pattern of myth and culture which he now finds collapsed. The broken remains of coherence are violently juxtaposed within this parataxis where there is no celebration of the idea of fragmentation or exhilaration in disorder as found in postmodernism while escaping "the claustrophopic embrace of fixed systems of belief". The decay of traditional patterns does not trouble the postmodernist.

The postmodern looks for breaks, for events but not new worlds, and for shifts and irrevocable changes in the representation of things. Emphasising mainly the variations, it has no concern with what is likely to come of such changes. In postmodern culture, `culture has become a product in its own right; the market has become a substitute for itself and fully as much a commodity as any of the items it includes within itself... Postmodern is the consumption of sheer commodification as a process.’ Any sophisticated theory of the postmodern ought to bear something of the same relationship to Horkheimar and Adorno’s old ‘culture industry’ concept as MTV or fractal ads bear to the fifties television series.

While the idea of modernity emphasised the eurocentric vision of man and western ideals which would finally prevail over the universe, the two wars and the rise of nationalism showed an incredulity towards metanarratives. The entire project of modernity was to collapse with uninhibited pluralism and anti-realism in a multicultural world leading to multiplicity of interpretations and constructions. But this gave no answers to the question of a single reality. Oscillating between tradition and modernity, the critique of a scientific-capitalist world and the new desire to go back to nature would give place to a `rehabilitation of mythical forms of thought.’ New forms of postmodern art would no longer seek cohesive totalisation or integration into the whole.

When after two centuries, the arts, technology, knowledge, and liberty have not aided mankind, and neither economic nor political liberalism, nor the various Marxisms, emerge from the bloodstained last two centuries free from the suspicion of crimes against mankind, the Lukasian idea of Romantic anti-capitalism begins to dare the Enlightenment and the bourgeois social order. Hegel and Marx too responded to the Romantic critique of the Enlightenment. In fact, this is "notoriously a staple of fin-de-siecle European thought". The assumption of historical progress is cast out by T.S. Eliot who calls contemporary history `a panorama of futility and anarchy’, and Frank Kermode who talks about `the sense of an ending’. Probably the feeling of endism of the apocalyptic conception of postmodernity is the `cultural logic of late capitalism’ which takes the ultra-modernism of technology towards the final disaster against the background of parody and pastiche. The urge to control nature has climaxed in the completely administered world of late capitalism `in which the repressed returns in the barbarous and irrational form of fascism’, and where, as Jameson maintains, the paradoxical nature of desire for the anxiety of totalisation becomes an absolutely inescapable reality. Such a world confuses any hermeneutic effort at representing reality which is the central dilemma of postmodernism.

The seemingly unresolvable paradoxes of contemporary debates revolve around the inability of visualising any idea of Utopia in modern reality and probably this arises out of the obsession with anti-foundational and anti-essentialist ways of looking at "reality". The `unrepresentable exterior’ of these debates is, according to Jameson, the very locus of the future. For instance the first sentence in his book, Signatures of the Visible, which has been quoted by the judges as a case of bad writing, is very clear and comprehensible. As Michael Sprinker has written in the Times Literary Supplement, one can paraphrase it as follows:

The visual is pornographic in the sense that it draws one’s gaze and prevents one’s looking away from it or beholding it inattentively. One cannot help but stare at it. Then, to think about this particular feature of the visual adds yet another layer to its inherent fascination, on the assumption that one’s thinking is not utterly hostile to the nature of pornography itself. Even the most minimal visual images in film derive their aesthetic or emotive power from their effort to deny or hide this pornographic aspect, which the visual possess. And they do so, not by any over attempt, to enforce a certain way of viewing them in the viewer. The latter is a less easily realised task."

But to paraphrase is to destroy, and to suggest is to create. The judges in Christchurch, New Zealand, where the Bad Writing Contest was held probably found it difficult to understand a sentence which is robustly constructed and says with lucidity in a single utterance what Sprinker puts across in many, and is definitely ‘a powerful, stylistically bold experiment in expanding the syntactic and semantic potentials of language.’