Abstract
Esteemed author of Arguing and Thinking (1987) and Freudian Repression (2009), Michael Billig is a broad-gauged British social psychologist who did not choose the title of this book casually. He has created a serious if lively study of poor prose among social science writers, and he proposes reasons for this “trained incapacity,” as it was once called. Rather than taking the cultural highroad in 1946 with W. H. Auden—”Thou shalt not answer questionnaires / Or quizzes upon World-Affairs, / Nor with compliance / Take any test. Thou shalt not sit / With statisticians nor commit / A social science”—Billig cheerfully admits that as a graduate student in the late 1960s, he did not understand a great deal of what he was asked to read, particularly the pieces that were more or less “theoretical.” At first he wondered if he was mentally incapable or culturally unprepared, but finally he began to realize that when he “translated” high-sounding jargon into everyday speech, a lot of what was being proffered as sophisticated newness was in fact simply bad writing. Then a miracle happened: he read Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, and then Beyond a Boundary by C. L. R. James, finally coming with even more relief to Freud, and discovered that intelligent writing about social matters could be done in a way that does not irritate or bore or unintentionally antagonize its audience. He noticed that these three writers, along with George Orwell (“Politics and the English Language”) were not academics. As the years went by, Billig has “avoided reading the technical journals which I should read” and has “never taken on the technical vocabulary as if it were my first language.” Building on earlier and kindred works by Brand Blanshard and Stanislav Andreski, Billig has skewered the impenetrable noise in Lacan’s writing but has taken his general critique of scholarly prose further than that.
Writing even more for junior scholars than for his peers (especially in Chapter Three, where Bourdieu is analyzed), Billig worries that the crass self-promotion infiltrating academic life, ever since the easy “metrics” of internet success began to entrance administrators, has sponsored ever more rapid “production” and led to self-important posturing rather than scrupulous attention to The Word. William James, as usual, is used as an admonitory foil to what appears today under the perplexed heading of “scholarly prose.” Most novice scholars are strong-armed into using acceptable, discipline-specific terms, even when they do not fully understand what is at stake. In Chapters Four through Six, Billig takes academic writing apart, showing that an adoration of nouns to the detriment of verbs removes people from the social and substitutes bodiless forces and conceptual configurations that move about in a zombie-zone utterly distanced from actual human experience. This process he calls “nominalization” and “passivization” in a chapter titled “How to Avoid Saying Who Did It.” In later chapters Billig helpfully disassembles several articles, all in the 60th anniversary issue of the British Journal of Sociology in 2010 and noted by others as particularly important. One is by two “Foucauldian scholars” whose concern is “governmentality,” and the others are by Ulrich Beck and by John Urry. To these he adds a treatment of “conversation analysis” by Harvey Sacks, E. A. Schlegloff, and others.
It is important to note that Billig is not merely dismissive, nor does he lunge after humor for its own sake, as one suspects was partly the case when C. Wright Mills and Pitirim Sorokin separately tore at Talcott Parsons’ prose 50 years ago. Rather, Billig is seriously concerned that even the “best” work offered today by social scientists of high estimation manages without any conscious effort to bury active, meaning-seeking humans in a muddy trench of “nounsy” writing quite dead at its core. This reminds us of Auden’s wise and gentle humor following the horror of WWII: “Thou shalt not do as the dean pleases, / Thou shalt not write thy doctor’s thesis / On education. / Thou shalt not worship projects nor / Shalt thou or thine bow down before / Administration.”