From Nikola Chubrich
Subject: Bad Writing 1997
Date: September 8, 2020

Dear Nikola,

Yesterday you e-mailed me the following sentences as an example of bad writing:

"The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power."

I agree that the sentence is difficult to interpret. I presume to recognize in it a similarity to the writings of Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Schelling, Schopenhauer. I propose that the sentence you quoted illustrates the fundamental synthetic quality of language, in that the sentence's separate, undefined and perhaps undefinable components fuse into a conglomerate whose meaning is derived not from its constituent concepts, but from the inclinations and conceptual needs of the reader. Such a process, it seems to me, explains the force and fame of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Kant's readers, if I interpret the situation correctly, were stymied by the collapse of divinely secured reality, a collapse which occurred in the backwater of the Protestant Reformation, a collapse which could neither be prevented nor repaired by Spinoza's logical mysticism or by Leibniz' courageous hypothesis of God's pre-established harmony as the quasi-mathematical blueprint for the best of all possible worlds. The task of reading Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, as I understand it, is to devise an escape route from the web of Kant's undefined and undefinable latter-day scholastic, purely hypothetical concepts, escape into an atmosphere where each of us, as Kant's readers, can explore and define the reality of his, the reader's own experiences in his own world.

Have I lapsed into a scholastic obscurantism similar to that which I presumed to criticise and to cure? Please let me know, when you are in the mood to write or to talk on the phone. Stay well, and give my regards to your parents.

EJM