Culture Rover

jargon, its content & its discontents.

At first, one feels sympathetic to journalistic critiques of academic jargon. Jargon is mystifying, limiting, too specialized. It is stultifying. It signifies nothing. Hot air balloons. Wanky guitar solos of the ivy tower. All those fancy-schmancy words are just frilly brims on new hats, but the same old rabbits get pulled out.

But since accusations of elitism are once again the topic du jour in the political realm, these anti-elitist complaints seem more disturbing in cultural spaces. What is really going on here?

In comments about the 2008 Experience Music Project Pop Conference, the same old academics vs. journalists debate rears its head again. Alfred Soto writes on his blog, Humanizing the Vacuum:

The decision to include more papers by academics injected an unwholesome amount of pedagogical oratory and jargon into several promising ideas (I never want to hear about “praxis,” “teleological,” and “heteronormative valences” in my presence again).

He continues by arguing that academics “care little about audience reactions” and “are taught to expunge their presentations of opinions.” Whereas, by implication, journalists focus on their audience and on expressing their tastes.

What is troubling about this post is what is troubling about articles such as Roberta Smith’s reactionary screed against artists using the word “practice” to describe their working conditions, aims, and experiences (I usually love Roberta Smith’s articles and reviews, but found this one to be problematic).

Both Soto and Smith rightfully point to moments when word choice and vocabularies from specialized fields of research are used poorly (in academia, one might say “deployed” poorly, to use the jargon). But Soto and Smith also confuse the poor contextualization and use of these words with their actual, worthwhile analytic power.

In the process, they move from efforts to make sense of (to “probe” in the jargon) the concepts to dismissals of academic approaches. The tone borders on rage and certainly expresses a kind  anti-intellectualism. You almost expect the next sentence in their writing to read: you latte-drinking, ivy-tower eggheads..stop being so out of touch and elite!

These kinds of rants do not pause to consider that the same kinds of word choices and perspectives (“discourses” in academic jargon) are very much at work in art and music criticism.

The “opinions” that Alfred Soto bemoans vanishing from academic presentations at EMP and remaining in journalistic work are themselves grounded (“embedded” in the jargon) in specialized trivia, subtle gestures, insider know-how, and compressed references to larger positions and tastes. Ever read a Robert Christgau review? You have to know your pop music history quite well and have your hipster meter on to glean the full meanings of this kind of supposedly non-academic, public writing.

The point is that there’s a specialized way of communicating in pop music criticism, art criticism, and cultural criticism that is every bit as baffling to the outsider and every bit as intellectual (thank god) if you take the time to grapple with the ideas behind the words.

Here’s a different route to propose for academics and cultural critics alike.

Our task is in both academia and cultural criticism/journalism should not be to dismiss the appearance of jargon, but rather to crack open the codes of linguistic locks. Sure, jargon can block access to “opinions” (or arguments and interpretations as one might call them in academic settings). But one word can also serve as the access point to ideas trapped within.

So, critique the confines of linguistic shorthand, if you will, but scale the walls anyway for what might hide behind the ivy-towering presence of jargon. Because a breakout is at stake. If we write right, we could be able to liberate a lot of intellectual substance from the prison house of language. There are important ideas lurking if you can turn the keywords right.