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Critical Discourse Studies Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rcds20
LEARN TO WRITE BADLY: HOW TO SUCCEED IN THE SOCIAL SCIENCES a
Sean Phelan a
Massey University, Wellington, New Zealand Published online: 27 Apr 2015.
Click for updates To cite this article: Sean Phelan (2015): LEARN TO WRITE BADLY: HOW TO SUCCEED IN THE SOCIAL SCIENCES, Critical Discourse Studies, DOI: 10.1080/17405904.2015.1035842 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17405904.2015.1035842
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Critical Discourse Studies, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
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LEARN TO WRITE BADLY: HOW TO SUCCEED IN THE SOCIAL SCIENCES Michael Billig, 2013 Cambridge and New York, Cambridge University Press 234 pp., ISBN: 978-1-107-67698-5 (pbk £14.99)
Criticisms of the self-indulgent and abstruse nature of academic writing – from both left and right, from both inside and outside the academy – are nothing new. Academics are denounced for writing in wilfully obscure ways, which can disguise the ordinariness of their arguments and give a grand self-importance to truisms and banalities. In its most reactionary form, these criticisms are directed against scholars aligned with the politically suspect world of critical theory and continental philosophy or, worse again, those enthusiastic about intellectual developments linked to post-structuralism and post-modernism. Backgrounded by the cultural memory of events like the Sokal affair, the widely publicized 1996 case when the physicist Alan Sokal succeeded in getting a spoof article published in the journal Social Text, the notion that ‘difficult’ academic prose can be safely dismissed as little more than opportunistic gobbledygook has become something of a commonplace, embodied in a no-nonsense worldview that can see through the self-aggrandizing strategies of ‘bullshit academics’. The Sokal affair is briefly mentioned in the introduction to Michael Billig’s book. However, he cites it to underline how his critique of academic writing is different both in its political intuitions and object of analysis. Billig’s target is a wide-ranging one, equally interrogative of the scientism of the empirical psychologist and conversation analyst, as the more explicitly theoretical idioms of the critical discourse analyst and governmentality researcher. Citing examples from research fields close to his own work, Billig presents an incisive and sometimes very funny analysis of how academics in different social sciences conspire to eliminate people from their writing, populating it instead with the nominalized, abstract nouns that are the stock-in-trade of academic discourse. What is most original and interesting about the book, however, is how Billig embeds his examination of academic writing in a politically astute analysis about the condition of the neoliberal university (even if he himself does not call it that, perhaps because the quick appeal to an abstract ‘neoliberalism’ can itself be symptomatic; indeed, in even invoking the term, Billig might suggest I have perfectly illustrated how academics construct links that open up opportunities ‘for promoting your work, your approach and your academic self’ (p. 53)). In short, he argues that the neoliberal imperatives to brand and commodify the self – the self as entrepreneur – are now encoded in the promotional and marketized register of much academic writing.
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Billig’s analysis of how writing conventions are determined by scholars’ need to increase their symbolic capital and profits in the academic marketplace is subtle, closely attentive to the structural context in which scholarship and research is produced in an world of academic capitalism. His analysis of particular examples of academic prose can be biting; indeed, against his own intellectual intuitions, Billig can sometimes sound like a hardnosed rational choice theorist who sees nothing else but the pursuit of market distinction. However, the tone is also self-aware and confessional, and many readers are likely to recognize unflattering aspects of themselves in Billig’s descriptions of some of the more cringeworthy features of academic life. He brilliantly captures academics’ dependence on citation scores as measures of their scholarly esteem in the university of the audit culture, irrespective of the intellectual substance of the citation. Showing how ‘our vanity and insecurity can become embarrassingly plain’ if we personalize the conditions euphemized by an abstract conceptual appeal to ‘academic governmentality’ (p. 255), Billig underlines how circulation, in itself, can become a defining imperative of scholarly life: Why, I might ask, am I bothering to find out how many times other academics have mentioned my work. And why do I feel pleased if the number is high? What difference does it make? It doesn’t seem to matter how the others are mentioning me, whether they do so in passing or at length, whether in complimentary or critical tones. All that matters is that I am mentioned, again and again. (p. 155)
Interrogating the detrimental effects on academic writing of scholars’ need to have their work circulated in an increasingly fragmented academic economy is one of the kernel arguments of the book. However playful the tone, the argument is not made glibly: Billig knows that livelihoods and futures are at stake in an academic environment geared towards the mindless overproduction of research. His concluding prognosis is bleak. The book is unlikely to remedy the general trends it identifies, he suggests; his recommendations may ‘just be whispers in the wind’ (p. 206) as the authority of market logics over the university intensifies. Insisting that academics of different hues often willingly submit themselves to competitive regimes they might otherwise disavow (‘we cannot put all the blame on the mangers’, he argues; ‘our worries can bring us pleasures’ (p. 260), Billig offers no easy answers to the young scholars he meets who agree with him, but who nonetheless know they must produce and produce, and talk themselves up, if they want to have any chance of establishing a foothold in today’s academy. Billig’s focus on the imperatives of circulation is tied to an argument about speed, maintaining that ‘when writing for audiences of specialists it is easier and certainly speedier to reach for the common technical terminology than try to clarify one’s thoughts’ (p. 6). Against the assumption that the technical discourse ensures greater conceptual and scientific precision, he argues the opposite, suggesting that the general registers of theory and science produce less information about the practices and people being studied. Billig champions ‘the little words’ (p. 154), above all the verb, and he interrogates a scholarly tendency (exemplified for him by Bourdieu) to see ordinary language as both intellectually and politically suspect. Citing Wittgenstein as an example of how it ‘is possible to use ordinary language originally’ (p. 10), Billig questions a scholarly reflex that equates intellectual originality with the creation of new nouns which, if successful, are then circulated and appropriated by others. The penchant for novelty normalizes a set of linguistic conventions
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BOOK REVIEW
difficult to tell apart from the register of advertising and marketing, he argues, as scholars strive to get their ‘big words’ noticed in ‘decreasingly narrow circles’ (p. 6). Chapter 2 links the emergence of a culture of narrow writing and quick reading to a world of mass publication, where academics are now expected to continuously produce ‘outputs’ even when they have nothing to say. In contrast to the broad intellectual range of thinkers like Adam Smith, ‘who was writing in small words for big circles’ (p. 15), Billig argues today’s academic is compelled to align themselves with a particular sub-discipline, tribe or approach (‘to wander forth in the social sciences without an approach is almost like going naked into a shopping mall’ (p. 38), he quips), for, in a world of competing academic ‘brands’, identification with a field or discipline is no longer adequate: ‘all social scientists need two approaches: the approach that you take and the approach that your approach has taken against’ (p. 61). The result is a culture of ‘fast scholarship’ (p. 36). Scholars gain traction and visibility by regurgitating the codes of their specialist approach, and once the ‘requisite big words’ have been acquired, it becomes ‘easier to bang out paragraphs of clunky writing’ (p. 38). These rituals of ‘procedural display’ are the product of how students are ‘socialized into the academic culture of their sub-discipline’ he argues in Chapter 3. Knowing the right codes and right names to drop allows them to ‘pass’ as ‘native academics’, irrespective of the level of insight displayed (p. 57). Revisiting an argument he previously made against the use of the acronym ‘CDA’, Billig examines the rise of acronyms in academic discourse in Chapter 4, suggesting their appeal stems from their apparent capacity to ‘provide solidity to the “thing” that the academic is writing about, especially if that thing is an approach’ (p. 89). The academic fetish for creating conceptual entities that elide agency is examined further in Chapters 5 and 6, exemplified by how critical scholars who expose ‘reification’ can performatively contradict themselves by appealing to the abstract noun rather than actors and processes that reify. Billig ends Chapter 5 with a particularly funny example of how ‘mediatization’ and ‘mediation’ researchers battle it out to establish their own term as a master category of media research (as if simply invoking the preferred concept has magical effects), in a competitive register that reminds him of the Pepsi/Coke wars of the 1960s. He extends the argument to different examples in Chapters 7 and 8, identifying grammatical parallels in the otherwise disparate fields of cosmopolitanization research and experimental social psychology. Billig’s willingness to interrogate the orthodoxy and glibness of different research traditions and vocabularies, however distinguished the scholarly target, is one of the most admirable and engaging features of the book. Indeed, his heterodoxy can sometimes seem averse to any institutional expression of a collective academic identity. Appealing to one of his intellectual heroes William James, he ends Chapter 3 by commending a defiantly solitary image of academic life, valorizing the liberating potential of ‘being alone’ (p. 66) over the easy flattery of the conference circuit. Yet, unlike the individualism of the career academic, Billig’s individualism is infused with a radical democratic energy that is contemptuous of those enamoured by their own scholarly identities. Despite its pessimism, the book also articulates an affirmative vision of scholarly life. It shows those of us who write academic prose how we might enact a more egalitarian relationship with our readers and a more egalitarian relationship with the
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people we study. Contrary to a recent philosophical turn that privileges the ‘object’ and non-human ‘agent’, Billig is an unapologetic humanist. He challenges us to not lose sight of how our impressive-sounding concepts can do violence to the lives they describe and summon. I can only recommend this lucid, combative and persuasive book. As in his earlier books on nationalism and Freud, Billig is superb at grasping the political and ideological significance of rhetorical forms and conventions that typically go unnoticed. His mode of engagement, even when he is mocking, is serious and thoughtful. There is nothing perfunctory about the analysis, or none of the knee-jerk anti-intellectualism that can colour critiques of academics and academic writing. Whatever your ‘approach’, anyone committed to the idea of an emancipatory social science should read this book. Sean Phelan Massey University, Wellington, New Zealand Email:
[email protected] © 2015 Sean Phelan http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17405904.2015.1035842
