Anyway I think I am starting to wander off-topic…

E.B. White: “Explaining a joke is like dissecting a
frog, nobody learns anything and the frog dies of it.”

The idea that you can beg off speculating about the intended audience of a text also doesn’t fly with me. Many literary critics would say that all texts have an implied reader (Booth), summon up a public (Warner), or are situated in a world of already spoken utterances (Bakhtin) or a past ‘natural history’ of texts (Silverstein and Urban, etc. etc.). Anyone who has written has surely had the experiences of worrying about who will read their work — whether its because they’ve pitched the book a certain way to their publisher, or because they are aiming for certain colleagues. Even worrying about the fact that you don’t know who its for a way of worrying about your books audience. So this is a perfectly natural question for Ozma to ask — and for us to believe Maurer et. al have thought about.

I think there is still a point about style in Tim’s comments that I’m not really sure about. Imitating translations of a foreign style naturally can be a good thing or a bad thing depending on how well the translation works in the destination language. Imitating a _poor_ translation is reckless practice.

The difference that I felt was that Maurer’s writing (and Raffles’s, and Riles’s, and even your own refusal to tell anybody what you meant by “desire as lack” as the definining principle of anthropology here a few weeks ago) was that I felt many moves were made in it to push readers away. You don’t know exactly how I am using Poovey? You don’t know what a magic square is? You find my willfully peculiar shifting about of verb tenses totally opaque? Move along, then.

It’s not “difficulty” or even dense referentiality that gets me (Sahlins’s lovely writing is always full of pointy-headed jokes, for example). It’s more a feeling I get — and I’ll concede it could be a wrong, “conspiracy theorist”, tinfoil chapeu feeling — that very little effort is being made to include the reader in and a fair amount of effort is being made to signal that certain kinds of readers (such as my puzzled self) are being warded off. I don’t GET that as an approach to scholarship.

Good point, and another opportunity to recognize the genius of David Hume! But, at the same time, I can’t help but wonder if it wasn’t something about Hume’s ideas which gave his writing such clarity. No deep hidden structuring structures here…

Which brings me to Rex’s point about translation (don’t be sad, I love that quote! but I also know why there is an industry dedicated to writing books explaning his work, from Dreyfus on). All of the quotes in my lineage (which was itself comedic, not the quotes in it) are translations, except for the one from ML,L. And leaving aside whatever gets muddled in the retelling, I think there is something important that happens when English speakers imitate the writing style of French and German philosophers. There is a difference in the way we accept rhetoric or portentious prose. What they read as intellectual artistry we read as po-faced twaddle. I don’t know why. Maybe someone who is more linguistically able, or rhetorically schooled, does. But when someone from the UK or US writes like a translated German then you know they are just asking for it from plebs like us!

Rex, I do think we should ask Maurer to tell us about his writing on SM. You go first.

It’s clear in the case of Network Inside Out that Riles was heavily influenced by Munn and Strathern, who are both fantastically talented people. However even the most charitable has issues with their style, and their work is sui generis — no one can (or should) do Munn or Strathern except Munn and Strathern.

We should ask Riles or Maurer to explain themselves publically here on SM, but I really think that they think they are just laying down mind-blowing and impressive prose.

Tim — ah, well, yes. One thing about being a novice prof is that you are very often willy-nilly springing things on your students that you have not yet read yourself (or at least that’s how I do it!). So I really did appreciate, for example, your recommendation of Congo-Paris which was quite teachable vs. Mutual Life, Limited which was only intermittently teachable. But I don’t know about just finding the “comedic” value in various incarnations of academic writing: for example, the Bourdieu phrase you cite as comic I actually think is rather elegant, by which I mean that I’m willing to believe that all of this stuff strikes some people as jazzy and right on. I just wonder, how many of those people are there out there, and why do they seem so firmly to have the upper hand in the discipline?

In terms of the aesthetic of his writing style I think you can trace a loose (comedic) lineage:

First you have Rilke:

“Be ahead of all parting, as though it already were behind you, like the winter that has just gone by.
For among these winters there is one so endlessly winter that only by wintering through it will your heart survive”

Which is nice. And intelligible. But then we have Heidegger the Poet, plodding about in imitation:

“The jug presences as a thing. The jug is the jug as a thing. But how does the thing presence? The thing things. Thinging gathers. Appropriating the fourfold, it gathers the fourfold’s stay, its while, into something that stays for a while: into this thing, that thing.”

In academia the tradition beings thereabouts. So we have Deleuze and Guattari and others. Bourdieu too springs to mind:

“structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures”

And so we end up with Maurer:

“Circulating reference’s reference to circulation allows the abstraction and stabilization of circulation itself as a new problematic.”

I can see the attraction of this stuff – I loved Rilke as much as Pynchon when I was in my early 20s. And knowing the above quotes probably means I have absorbed the academic horror versions to some extent. But for the most part any academic attempt at this kind of word play comes across as thunderously dull and portentious. I think anyone who has written a phd knows the temptation to wax lyrical – but I am not sure finding poertry in finance really helps the reader that much.

First, it is not just dense, it’s SHORT. I would readily read a longer, less dense version of it.

A lot of the book’s interest, for me at least and possibly others, is the way that it attempts to address a lot of concerns at points where epistemology and rhetoric join together — there’s now a long list of ways of naming things, writing about them, assuming epistemic authority, etc. etc. that many feel are problematic. I felt ML,L did a superb job of producing a text that scrupulously (perhaps obsessively) avoided things that Weren’t To Be Done.

At the end, though, I lost the forest for the trees. I had a sense of the moves that anthropology should make, but lost track of why we were making them — what the disciplinary goals were. Why should we or anyone else take us seriously if all we do is ‘ride along side’?

I am always ready to stand up for difficult prose when it is necesasry, and there is a certain elegance to some ‘difficult’ authors (Levi-Strauss’s verbal acrobatics, for instance). But some seem to think the prose in ML,L and other works like it is actually aesthetically pleasing. I think of Riles’s “Network Inside Out” here, which takes an intriguing point and an interesting fieldsite and buries it under punishingly and deliberately opaque prose. This is more than bullshitting or obscurantism — it’s a stylistic choice I don’t understand. Perhaps this is what happens when you expose impressionable young things Deleuze and Strathern at an early age?