Massumi, 1-2

Massumi, ch. 1

So I thought Descartes' Error was impenetrable because of the neuroscience, and I told myself it would get better. I thought Brennan was impenetrable first because she writes like a tool and later because apparently she died before edits, and I told myself it would get better. Now I crack open this Massumi crap and I become more convinced with each passing day that rhetoric needs less to do.

Deleuze and Guattari, who you're familiar with if you read the introduction or if you've ever seen someone incredibly pretentious refer to "becoming-(insert anything here)," had this interesting idea which kind of said that if an idea was complex enough, truly complex, it shouldn't be understandable by the layman. No idea which was accessible to many people was powerful enough to do much of anything; there's a reason we treat our own colds but go to doctors to cure cancer, and why Law & Order:SVU probably does less for rape prevention and litigation than a lobbyist. Big things are too complicated, too powerful, for us; they require expert attention. So, said Deleuze and Guattari, should be the social sciences. They went so far as to intentionally confuse their language, hoping that this would ensure that the only people who could read the work and get anything out of it were smart enough to really access their ideas' power. Intelligent readers weren't going to cherry-pick off the surface and then publish headlines like "SCIENCE PROVES: WOMEN ARE SMARTER THAN MEN."

Actually, the people who ended up using Deleuze and Guattari the most were high school debaters, who cherry-picked interesting phrases and made them mean whatever they wanted. The people who truly wanted to work with the ideas put forth wrote D&G readers that restated everything they'd said, but more clearly and more usefully. This is why Deleuze and Guattari's meritocracy of rhetoric is really damn stupid.

Writing, though a blunt instrument for communication, is about clarity. Sure, it's about beauty, it's about information, it's about a million things. But it's pretty much about clarity. Good writing is clear as a bell. That doesn't mean all good writing is a bulleted list, but good writing, whatever else it does, gets something across, and the intensity with which we feel that something is a marker of how purely the affect was transmitted. In early school, we know who the good writer in class is because she uses correct grammar. Before maturity, this is one of the best markers of good writing that we have because few writers have settled into the voices that will make more complex subjects easy to write about in the future. The writer with the best grammar, in a class full of people who do not know what verb agreement is, is the clearest -- literally. We can understand her because she writes according to the rules.

Later in life, we know who the good writer is because we know exactly what he's talking about. Now that almost everyone's caught their grammar up to a mutually comprehensible level, clarity turns into word choice, paragraph structure, and more complex rhetorical figures. We know who the good writer is because it doesn't take us ten years to ferret out his point. We know him because he has the skill to transmit even the most complex ideas clearly -- he does not use the complexity of his argument as an excuse to obfuscate. He doesn't think his ideas are so new and different that we don't even have language for them yet; he knows for a fact that we do because he used language when he was thinking about his ideas. Most importantly, he doesn't pretend his argument is more complex than it is by confusing us on purpose (which I suspect is what D&G were after). Maybe he gets creative with metaphor, but these serve his point; literary figures thrown in to give a passage some "color" are distractions, but the good writer knows when and how graphic images may be more helpful to a viewer than a cut-and-dry definition.

Mr. Massumi, I get that your ideas are revolutionary, I really do. But I do not understand a goddamned thing you say. Maybe this is because you use phrases and single words instead of complete sentences, but Toni Morrison does that too and I know what she's talking about. Teresa Brennan, clunky though she was, wrote in complete sentences -- confusion with her came more from her elevated and inconsistent vocabulary, but she set down exactly what she wanted you to take away and for the most part it worked. Massumi is doing something else. I think he might be enjoying himself too much, if that makes any sense. For him, his idea is full of drama, and his language serves that drama; in practice, no one but him can see the drama because no one but him has several advanced degrees in rhetoric. Either he failed to transmit the intensity of his affect or the intensity is specific to him, but either way, he failed in a specific way as a writer.

This whole blog probably makes me a filthy functionalist, but academic writing is terrible and I'm sick of it. I look forward to the three-paragraph version of this information that Dr. Davis will have to translate for us in class, because I'm sure it was interesting.