I think in question #1 he cheats by saying “pseudo-technical” when what he really means is technical. Adorno, for example, uses a lot of philosophical terminology in his writing, but none of it is jargon, nor does he coin neologisms. In fact, in his essay against Heidegger, he makes the explicit case against jargon. It’s interesting how much Heidegger you can hear behind Mallon, for example in the concerns about technology and about idle chatter.

Personally I have a hard time believing that any of the most gifted students from universities go to business school, since there is nothing that one might properly refer to as a “gift” that has any relevance at all to business. Business requires hard work, ambition, a common touch, and some understanding of economics; intelligence or sensibility would be a disadvantage, since they make it harder to understand the public taste.

I just got out of a meeting with fellow graduate assistants and the instructor of record for a historical survey of British and American literature on which we're working and the issue of jargon often arises in our discussions. At the moment it seems especially apt since we're reading the British Romantics. In the “Preface” to Lyrical Baallads Wordsworth wrote that he wanted write in the language of real men, by which he meant rustics. Coleridge disagreed with W and imagined that jargon could just as easily be found among rustics as it could among effete city-dwellers. More immediately I was prompted to think of jargon because we are reading Frankenstein and its apparent amorality. Unlike later film adaptations, the moral of Shelley's novel is less clear. This can partially attributed to the fact that story is told from multiple points of view without any central voice to read the others didactically. One of my colleagues spoke of the way that the “I” shifts so readily in the novel. Essentially, I think both the statement, “the story is told from multiple points of view” and “the I readily shifts throughout the narrative” say essentiaally the same thing about the novel. The latter of course invokes a heavier philosophical weight, but I wonder if one can gain an equally sophisticated understanding of the novel without implicitly invoking Emile Benveniste, and if one does invoke him, fully understanding the implications of doing so, does the novel then become the occasion for speaking about twentieth-century theories of language. Perhaps, this is what Mallon means by insulting texts: the jargon is but one symptom of the critic's presumptious arrogation of the text's priority. It seems safe to say that both the use of jargon and the accusation of having used ar speech acts laden with power. While I might use jargon as a shorthand for complex philosophical ideas, the thing in itself, I can also use it as a means for establishing my authority. At the same time tto accuse someone of using jargon is to accuse them of pretentiousness and intellectual fakery. Regarding the question of do-gooder humanities folks, I've spoken with colleagues who are drawn to literary criticism because they see it as a form of social activism. One in particular found herself in a dilemna because her favorite novel was Blood Meridian, which certainly has something to do with race but seems to exist beyond good and evil. I recall the class that the persecuted professor of The HUman Stain imagines would be appropriate for a classics department in the 1990's: Inappropriate (or is it Appropriate) Behavior in Classical Literature, a course that he claims would be over with before it began.

Michael,

Thanks for the comment --we're always happy to have new readers!

My complaint about the complaint about “jargon” is that it really sets the terms of the debate in advance, a bit like the old “are you still beating your wife?” question. At this point “jargon” is pretty much a pejorative term, so its not really fair to ask someone to defend it. Every culture and subculture develops its own vocabulary, from baseball fans to theoretical physicists. I'm on board with the idea that literary scholars should try to be as clear as possible when writing for a general audience, but not everything needs to be for a general audience and sometimes things are just complicated, which isn't always the critic's fault!

I haven't thought about Frankenstein in a while, but this makes a good example. First of all, I would say that the “shifting I” is not the same thing as “multiple points of view,” but that would require going into some detail. Instead, I'll just say that “multiple points of view” is an expression that is alien to Mary Shelly's writing. It may not seem like “jargon” in comparison to Benveniste's vocabulary because it is a bit more hallowed by time and because it implies a visual model that --despite the fact that we are talking about language here!-- many literary critics seems to find more natural than the vocabulary of linguistics, but I'm pretty sure than none of the Romantics ever talked about “narrative point of view.” (Correct me if I'm wrong.) They may have talked about or somehow used a similar idea, but the same could be said of Benveniste's “shifters.”

So, I don't think too many people would come out in favor of unnecessary jargon, but the problem is that if we're going to do anything other than read a given text aloud we need to use some kind of critical vocabulary. That's not to say that some aren't better than others or more appropriate than others in different contexts, etc., but 9 times out of 10 if you hear someone complaining that a critic has brought in “jargon,” anachronistic concerns, etc. you will discover, without too much effort, that the complainer is doing the same thing. The choice is not between “jargon” and no jargon, but among a multiplicity of jargons all “exterior” to the text to one degree or another.

If I were a jargon and I had to address an audience of words that thought they weren't jargon, I'd begin like Eleanor Roosevelt before the DAR: “My fellow immigrants . . .”

C Bush

I agree with you that there is no such thing as a primordial language uncorrupted by local circumstances. And I believe this was the point raised by Coleridge regarding Wordsworth’s claim in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads that he “proposed to [himself] to imitate, and, as far as is possible, to adopt the very language of men.” Wordsworth opposed this to the poetic jargon of people like Dryden and Pope, who might have preferred to write of the “finny tribe” rather than of “fish.” Coleridge on the other hand argues that “Every man’s language varies, according to the extent of his knowledge, the activity of his faculties, and the depth or quickness of his feelings.” As far as what sort of language the Romantics might have used to denote the effect toward which the phrases “multiple points of view,” “the shifting positionality of the I” or “embedded narratives” all gesture I don’t know. I suppose Keats’ notion of negative capability might have something to do with it.

That said, I would import some jargon into the discussion and provide a materialist reading of the circumstances I described in my earlier post. I understand that, in their particulars, the phrases “multiple points of view” and “the shifting positionality of the I” are not interchangeable. They have different use values. These will vary according to the sophistication of audience. For the majority of the undergraduates enrolled in the class, the meaning of the phrases, to the degree that they are comprehensible, will approach one another asymptotically: I imagine they will tend to believe that they denote the same thing or at least something very similar. Among a group of theoretically savvy graduate students or professors of literature their use values will diverge even more. Their exchange value, among both groups, on the other hand will differ significantly. I believe you refer to this implicitly when you speak of “multiple points of view” being more “hallowed.” The same applies to “the shifting positionality of the I,” which enhances your intellectual prestige, increases your cultural capital. In the same way accusing someone of using jargon establishes your populist credentials. Although I wouldn’t characterize Mallon as a populist, even though his questions seem to share much with the standard fare of right-wing populism. He seems to view jargon as one symptom of the degradation of culture generally and the humanities in particular: one expects to encounter jargon among the vulgar engineers at MIT but not among the refined humanists at Harvard. I should add that the preceding sentence should be placed in quotation marks and that I am cultivating my own negative capability in trying to channel Mallon.

You're certainly right that “multiple points of view” and “the shifting positionality of the I” are not interchangeable because they have different use values, but this is not the only reason they are not interchangeable! The vocabulary of viewpoint is used to describe how a person/psychology perceives the world, primarily if not exclusively according to a visual logic. Benveniste's account of the “I” tries to describe how a particular pronoun functions linguistically. I wasn't privy to the conversation you all had about Shelly's novel and the person using the Benveniste terminology may or may not have been using it in a correct of helpful way. But I do want to make the point that Benveniste, at least, isn't just trying to come up with a “finny tribe”-style way of saying something that could have been said just as well using existing terms.

I'm not quite sure if you and I agree or disagree about this, but for my position at least that exchange value and cultural capital might might explain the use of jargon, but they don't justify it. I think this is important because it constitutes a much stronger response to the complaints of Mallon, et al, many of whom think, precisely, that critical vocabulary exists only to make the speaker seem cool, authoritative, etc., whereas my point is that it is actually useful and in fact necessary.

I'm with C Bush on this. This accusation of “jargon” is tiresome, suggesting somehow that literary critics [i]unnecessarily[i] complicate or tamper with or corrupt the pure literary text by talking about it in other terms. You don't see people accusing scientists or even social scientists of jargon, because these experts have a right to their specialized vocabulary, which humanists somehow don't. The implication is that scientific phenomena are complicated and complex, but the objects that humanists study are not (or should not) be complex enough to require complex language and analysis.

In any case, it's a bit bizarre to see poetry described as “jargon” or to even conceive of “poetic jargon.” That's either a redundancy or a condemnation of all poetry, depending on how you're valuing jargon.

C Bush

When I use the term use value I mean the way that commodities differ from each other substantially, iron is not the same as wool. When I use the term to speak of language, I’m equating use value with “meaning.” If the term is used primarily for its exchange value, however, it is abstracted from that meaning and loses its particular significance while perhaps still retaining some vague remnant of its original context. I know the terms mean different things. That’s why I say that they have different use values.

Since the word “jargon” functions primarily as a pejorative, perhaps its best to leave it behind. In that case Mallon is accusing people of engaging in a form of language without specifying any particular content. I believe that this is one of the objections you raise against him and what your anecdote at the beginning of your post illustrates: there’s something uncanny about the purely formal nature of the self/ other construct, which can be filled by a variety of contents and prompt a simultaneous feeling of attraction and horror, identification and repulsion. In certain situations, however, terminology is convenient if not indispensable: if I’m talking to a group of people who have read their Foucault I can refer to deductive and productive forms of power and save myself the trouble of rehearsing The History of Sexuality in its entirety. That’s what I mean by its being a useful shorthand.

I imagine that different people register complaints about a jargon ridden academy, even if such an academy only exists in the realm of polemics, for different reasons. One might be because they believe in democratizing knowledge, an effort whose history extends back to the translation of the bible into the “vulgar” languages. I’m sure that at certain times you could find people who believed that sophisticated thought could only be expressed in Latin. To a certain extent, this must certainly be true. At the same time, Latin has also functioned as nothing more than a badge of distinction. I doubt that Mallon is actuated by any such egalitarian impulses though. He seems to move in quite the opposite direction. I would imagine that for him, jargon is mere pedantry, the language that one acquires in schools, probably public, rather than as a birthright.

I don’t mean to imply that people use literary terminology or that associated with linguistics primarily to be hip. I would prefer to interpret people more generously than that. Certainly, I myself am not immune to the charms of a newly discovered word. It would nonetheless make for an interesting study to trace the history of lit crit language and see whether or not some people in the humanities tried to compete with the sciences by imitating their rhetoric. Somebody probably already has.

Above I write that “sophisticated thought could only be expressed in Latin.” I don't mean that all thought outside of Latin is naive. I should have said that certain sophisticated thoughts can only be expressed in Latin.

Fair enough, Michael. I'm familiar with use value and exchange value . . .

When you wrote that “the phrases [. . .] are not interchangeable. They have different use values. These will vary according to the sophistication of audience,” this made their value sound rather defined by social context, i.e. a bit more like exchange value. I think I was also a little thrown off because as a rule when people make the commodity-language analogy it is precisely to claim an affinity between exchange value and meaning. That is, both are considered differential and not substantial.

In any case, I didn't mean to suggest that you don't know the difference between point of view and Benveniste's shifters --I have no idea what you do and don't know. It's just that you discussed the difference primarily in terms of cultural capital, etc. and I wanted to emphasize --for the benefit of those hostile to theory, jargon, etc.-- that there are also substantive differences.

C Bush

When I referred to the use value of the phrase varying according to the context in which it was uttered, I was thinking of the way the use value of something like magnetized iron might vary depending upon the culture in which it is used. For people who know something about the earth’s magnetic field it will have an entirely different application than for those who don’t. The first can use it for compass needles the second for anvils.

I hope I avoided coming off as arrogant in our exchanges. Thanks for providing your readers an opportunity to interact with your ideas.

Michael

Not at all --tone is a tricky thing on-line and I wouldn't have kept responding if I didn't think we were having a useful conversation!

Re the use-value thing, I think you are right that use value does in fact vary with context. The tricky thing here is that there's something ambiguous in the very notion of “use value” in Marx already, for whom in a sense use value isn't really “value” at all, but rather something intrinsic to the thing. So, sometimes when people say “use value” they mean something that is pretty much defined by the material properties of the thing and so not subject to context, not really a question of “value,” etc. You seem to be using it to refer to varieties of use not necessarily determined by exchange and pretty closely tied to the properties of the thing, but still varying a lot according to context. I think the sticking point really is the ambiguity of “use value” in Marx in the first place, which maybe should have been called “utility” and not value at all?

I’m persuaded. Utility sounds good. I can’t help but insinuate myself and Frankenstein into your conversation of Mallon one more time, though from a different angle. When my fellow graduate students and I were discussing the novel’s embedded narratives, we commented on the way that that Shelley’s formal choice created an amoral melodrama. Though the novel deals with overwrought emotions, something associated with the genre, it fails to draw the clear moral distinctions that are one of its hallmarks. To be more precise, it’s not certain who is more monstrous, Victor Frankenstein or his creature.

In asking if humanities people are ready to acknowledge the grave threat represented by Islamofacism, Mallon demands that we recognize the self evident monstrousness of the enemy and implies that without a clear concept of the inhuman, aka the monstrous, one cannot understand the proper object of a field of study that proposes the “Human” as its object. I’m guessing he wouldn’t like to see Shelley’s novel or its more recent progeny like Battlestar Galactica on too many reading lists.