I recently reread Delillo’s Underworld, which is superb. Apropos: I happened across a fight in lit. crit. land, which was, apparently, though I knew nothing of it until this afternoon, quite a thing a few years ago. Some basically unknown professor of North Korean literature wrote an essay, called the reader’s manifesto (the text doesn’t justify capitalizations), in which he declared that contemporary American ‘literary’ fiction (the inverted commas are his) was in a bad way. Evidence: Oprah’s stated puzzlement over some of Toni Morrison’s sentences, some genuinely or apparently puzzling sentences culled from great American novels etc. .

What interested me about all this was not, of course, that someone had made a stir with an insipid article that proclaimed the aesthetic superiority of Stephen King over Don Delillo (it really does). I was not, for example, horribly surprised to find bad taste rampant within ‘the literary establishment’ (again quotation marks are not mine – though this time I quote them not entirely ironically) . Rather, I was interested to see that even those who most assuredly opposed Myers’ views felt compelled to make concessions and, in the end, invariably failed to confront his fundamental contention, that writing should be clear, direct, to the point etc.. That is, I was interested to see that these claims, though conservative through and through are not recognized as such. This is all the more stark in light of the fact that their source, in this case, is himself a good liberal: green party supporter etc..

What then is the power of arguments such as Myers’, and how does the form of such arguments function ironically in relation to their contents? The answer to the first question is two fold. The contention that writing ought to be clear and concise is apparently commonsensical (the purpose of writing is communication), and it is apparently democratic. Of course, this appeal to democracy must be seen within its historical context.

In societies organized according to prior socioeconomic schema, power is legitimized by the supposed properties of its wielder, divine ancestry for instance, or more apropos our current concerns, access to esoteric texts. Naturally the subversive movements appropriate to this circumstance are to open the texts to the people – to give the people immediate access to the power they contain – and, more radically, to reveal the texts themselves to be internally devoid of power – to show that power is conferred on them from the outside, that they merely mark an empty space in the symbolic order. We see this in the protestant reformation, the enlightenment, the bourgeois revolutions, etc.. Thus, arguments of the reader’s manifesto type tend to suggest that there is a privileged class more or less cynically taking advantage of the opacity of certain texts in order to advance its political position.

The irony of this is of course that the writers of difficult text are most decidedly not holders of great political power. On the contrary, they tend to be radical critics of the established order (the Frankfurt School as a paradigm case). And it is in this light that the appeal to common sense suggests the difficulty of the texts to be a tactical blunder, (critiques that are difficult to understand are not likely to sway the masses and so forth).

The irony here is that the appeal to the commonsense goal of writing is often made by intellectuals whose own professional engagements are with highly specialized discourses (physicists are notoriously impatient with the (post)stucturalist movement, for instance).

How does the once subversive demand for clarity in discourse function in modern society to conserve the formations of power?

The point to note here, is that the organization of society has become infinitely more complex as the political discourses have become simpler. The way power functions in modern civilization is not through the charismatic fascination of the ruler, but rather through surveillance – through the collection, systematization and deployment of information within the fields of specialized discourses. That is to say, power functions in the interstices of specialized discourses, in the discontinuities, in the incommensurability of technical discourses. This is way the paradigm of subversive discourse in the current age is the dialectic.