A note on "verbosity"
"It is self-evident that nothing concerning art is self-evident anymore, not its inner life, not its relation to the world, not even its right to exist. The forfeiture of what could be done spontaneously or unproblematically has not been compensated for by the open infinitude of new possibilities that reflection confronts. In many regards, expansion appears as contraction. The sea of the formerly inconceivable, on which around 1910 revolutionary art movements set out, did not bestow the promised happiness of adventure. Instead, the process that was unleashed consumed the categories in the name of that for which it was undertaken. More was constantly pulled into the vortex of the newly taboo..."
The above passage from Adorno's Aesthetic Theory is said by many incompetent English teachers and professors to be the very model in wax of a dreaded "verbosity".
A "verbosity" we are to avoid as inappropriate to this New Era that is upon us, these snappy, jazz baby times in which we gots to rite email and stuff on the Internet and in which, if we yearn as we should for a Promotion, we are ill-advised to think outside of the box, and to leave that for the gods of the new era, who have their feasts on the backsides of beasts (Elvis Costello, All This Useless Beauty).
The interesting thing is that the Adorno passage is also said to be vague (let us suspend for a moment the question of its "verbosity" considered as an overlarge ratio of words to ideas, w/i > large n.)
I am teaching English through a series of accidents, chances, happenstances, and "sudden floods and falls of water".
In so doing I teach sentence diagramming.
The problem is that the ponderosities of my ponderosa homeboy Adorno CAN BE DIAGRAMMED and ARE GRAMMATICAL.
Beyond this, Adorno was a lover of his native *Sprache*, German, while being not at all in love with the *Hoch Deutsche* of the prewar and its elaborate Wilhelmeine insincerities of "mein Gnadige Frau", insincerities which produced Hitler's cruel turns of phrase in a dialectical reaction to the pre-Wilhelmine.
In Adorno's postwar radio broadcasts he used the cleansed postwar lingo including turns of phrase picked up from the "Amis" (the Americans).
At the same time, he reserved the goddamn (verdammt) right to be as complex in construction as he desired in order to be adequate to the object.
Is this a self-serving imprecision? I think not.
It was in fact a solid realismus in which Reality is decidedly outside us if, in the dialectic, constructed by us in the human conversation.
Contrast the language of prowar supporters, one of deliberate imprecision with no grammar beyond Chomsky type 0. A stream of "regular" symbols: WMD...Saddam == Hitler...the Caliphate..."terrorism" scrolling across the display in Times Square less meant to be parsed, and hence understood, than to overawe.
The structure is that in demiparsing the scrolled text, we have to assume as working people that the display of the text MEANS that someone did our homework, and, at the Department of State, actually parsed the situation.
But, as we now know, the dog done ate the homework. Department of State analysts were told to shuddup.
Computer programmers, of all people, can understand this, because you cannot write other than a trivial program Chomsky type 0.
[Regular expressions in .Net "powerful"? Yes, as long as you obfuscate and use special features to go outside Chomsky 0.]
Oh, and by the way.
In the above, Adorno MEANT that the Modernist revolution of 1910, when Fauvism and Expressionism in painting and late Romanticism in music became analytic Cubism and twelve tone composition, the "journey of discovery" immediately turned around to "rediscover" Stravinsky's neoclassicism, as well as that of Picasso in the 1920s, because owing to mechanisms within the new art and music movements themselves, the notion of discovery was denied by Modernism itself.
"More was constantly pulled into the vortex of the newly taboo": even as in rock and roll, or as in nonstandard sexuality as seen in Dan Savage's syndicated column Savage Love, the setting-out generates a felt need for Order, as in the case where one type of sexual pervert desires to exclude all other perversions on his newsgroup, and the revulsion let us say of the femme Lesbian for the twinkly gay man is exacerbated in the name of her exclusionary freedom to be self-identical.
Adorno accepted the idea that Modernism may well be an end point, and that you can't retreat from a Modernist "freedom" to a reimposition of control.
Or, in reality, you can, if you like being a Fascist, whether sexual as in Inge, she-wolf of the SS, tigress of Siberia, or Harem Mistress of the Oil Sheikhs (this porn star got around), or as in the standard variety. Adorno refused to go that road.
The point is that there is substantive assertion in the original, which has a syntax and no excess words. It is "verbose" only in that it presents the unwilling with a bitter pill indeed.
Fightin' Words
I've been away from "the Academy", meaning the academic university game, for about fifteen years. My guess is that Edward's been away for a bit longer than that. Regardless, I doubt that things have changed all that much since I was deeply mired in what was called rhetoric and composition, and also, oddly, "theory".
Theory was all the rage in the early 90s. And what the theory-ites were pushing was, well, I don't really know what it was. But it sure was complicated. And they sure did like to write verbosely about it. Writers like Derrida were certainly not terse, though they may have been grammatical. But you see, I have my own theory. If you have a good idea you express it clearly in language that anyone can understand. If you can't express it clearly then either a) you don't really have a good idea, b) you don't have a clear grasp on your own idea, or (most likely) c) you're more interested in showing off to your clever peers than in making your point.
(A fourth possibility also exists: that you're actually trying to disguise your own point. More on that below.)
For many academic writers the problem is likely some combination of a, b, and c, but c is the big one.
This does not mean that some ideas don't take longer to express than others. A complex idea might require an entire book. But let us not confuse the length of the expression with the clarity of that expression. So many academic writers who are so much smarter than you and me make it their point to obfuscate, so as to make sure that only those in the know (in their little group of fellow professors and wannabees) will understand what in the heck they are talking about. It's like gangsta hand signals or tattoos--a means of distinguishing who's cool from who's not. The cool students who understand the gibberish (or more likely, know how to pretend to understand it) can snark and roll their eyes at the great unwashed with their need for crisp and clear language. Oh, how vulgar!
Verbosity is popular in bureaucratic, government, and buisness writing. In this case the purpose is often to disguise what the actual point is. While, yes, speechmaker often use simple language to confuse, lawyers and lawmakers use incredibly complex language to do the same thing.
Edward makes a nice point about kitch, namely that kitch = re-inventing the wheel. Of course to my mind, at this point, Picasso having been dead for some time and Duchamp having thrown his urinal and bottle rack at us nearly a hundred years ago, nothing is more kitchy than artsy non-representational or abstract or "experimental" art.
In fact, I have the feeling that art, in the sense that it was understood by the modernists as the pursuit of the new, is impossible in the 21st century and has been impossible for some time. You cannot shock us nor impress us with your witty recontextualization anymore, you artists. We were already shocked long, long ago and we've pretty much gotten over it. "Experimentalism" is at this point dullest conformity. Far more shocking would be to paint that realistic portrait of Queen Mary with all your skill in all sincerity.
What this has to do with software development at this point, I don't know, but these are interesting subjects near and dear to my heart, and Edward, well, he just got me thinking.
Not Personal
I realized after posting my previous comment that my thoughts on verbosity in academic and bureaucratic writing might be taken as an attack on Edward's stone-skipping and loquacious style of blog post here on Developer.* and I want to make it clear that this was not my intention at all. I enjoy reading Edward's posts and read just about every one of them. We're just having a conversation here, and hopefully no one will take offense.
No offense
None taken.
Rob, the perception that academics are verbose outside the sciences was created en masse by the expansion of access to universities and the resultant careerism.
Which means you are right. Many English professors at levels below the zenith are stone bullshitters, as are many business professors and even some economists.
I in fact fled the humanities for computer programming because at my third-rate school, nothing the English professors said made sense!
In the humanities, it is however untrue that you can express a theory tersely. But this is also true in the sciences outside mathematics: take a look at the enormous book by Roger Penrose, The Structure of Reality.
Although this book is for the layperson, Penrose tries to present physics with the math left in because he believes the math is essential. At the same time, the book is HUGE, and, as does Derrida, Penrose revisits older theories in the light of newer theories repeatedly.
This is because, as you know, Newtonian physics considered as an axiomatic system applicable to Earth wasn't refuted by Einstein, only made a special case.
The critical difference in the humanities is, well, we are talking about intelligent agents, not elementary particles. Here, we have entered a conversation, in which it is impolite to be terse and in which one must sometimes appear verbose, with people who are due full recognition and respect.
The actual need for what appears to the uninitiated as verbosity in physics is hidden because part of the appeal of physics is "reification", the comforting feeling of mastery over things which relieves our anxiety over our relations with other people.
"More was pulled into the vortex of the newly taboo"
(1) After Picasso painted the dealer Kahnweiler in "high" analytic Cubist style, his pallette restricted to grey and brown, and the dealer reduced to colliding planes in space, it became impossible to paint a realistic portrait, say of Queen Mary, without making *kitsch*.
(2) In technology, the expansion of freedom *dialectically* atrophies unneeded skill. We have Windows, therefore it is no longer necessary, properly so, to write (as I had to write for my earliest programs) an *operating system*.
(3) But once you have thoroughly understood *kitsch* as an artist you CAN paint a portrait of the Queen and you CAN through technical mastery of the rules of kitschy painting, make the sugary postcard into a smartass remark about "kitschy portraits of Queen Mary". This happens in fact all the time.
(4) Likewise there is nothing preventing you from writing Linux. Linux, considered as a work of art and in the light shed by Adorno, was a rebuke to Windows in the same way Cezanne rebuked the Impressionists for not seeing any deeper than superficially.
(5) But I can't write "Linux" without "reinventing the wheel" which is kitsch. The demand has to be there, just as the art lover isn't looking for a penny postcard and its sentiments, but IS looking for a meta-statement on the sort of person who is satisfied by kitsch.
(6) Build Your Own .Net Language and Compiler played with being High Kitsch because Basic was already *kitsch* in 1964!
(7) Oops
(8) Well, now that I have a laptop again I can code. Which is a relief from the vortex of dialectic.