Jace Cooke, whose very interesting comments about Benjamin, intelligibility, and the use of “[a]mbiguity and separation of thought…like negative space, capable of insinuating a looming superstructure of hidden connection,” require me to retract, or at least stay, this judgment.
They also connect to a serious preoccupation I have about writing in general and this blog specifically. Few who write are not occasionally assailed with criticism, and in the past year I’ve more than once been chastised for pretentiousness (and, to a lesser degree, opacity).
Both charges are difficult to rebut, perhaps because I’m guilty; but there are also other problems:
- Pretension: It seems to be impossible to discuss many of the phenomena that interest me without striking others as pretentious; the subjects of this blog, for example, tend to be outside the realm of pop-discourse, and so are almost definitionally pretentious. I cannot help this, I don’t believe; there is no way to discuss, say Random Walk Theory and determinism without some finding the whole endeavor pedantic. If it’s pretentious to be interested in such subjects, I again plead helplessness; I like what I like; who is different?
- Prolixity: To the extent that some subjects which interest me have specific lexicons associated with them, I’m obliged to use the oft-mocked “ten dollar words” to consider or write about them. In general prose, however, I use whatever words I like; I can’t do very much about that, either, without falsifying my textual personality, and such falsification is not merely inauthentic but approaches pretension as a sort of simulation of self. Besides, words like “prolixity” are useful.
Cooke’s interest in distilling Benjamin’s thought into an essence intelligible to his grandmother is not only laudable but emblematic of the question posed by all forms of thought and expression which are not universally-accessible: can this be reformulated for broader comprehension without loss of meaning?
If it could, wouldn’t that mean it had been insufficiently clear originally? Isn’t maximally-intelligible communication the goal? When must that be sacrificed? What levels of profundity or specificity or density require the sacrifice of clarity?
Socialist Realists often said that music which couldn’t be hummed by the workers on the way out of the concert hall was “formalist affectation” (i.e., opaque pretension). Perhaps in my dismissal of Benjamin, I was projecting the insecurity that plagues me whenever I write: that I am performing a needlessly contrived, phony, polyphonic, cacophonous opus when a hummable ditty would do.
Note: And while this has been both pretentious and opaque, I cannot take credit for intentional self-referentiality in some post-modern orgy of hypertextual bricolage; I’m just tired.
