On my office wall, at an institution I taught at a few years ago, was a dull, unimposing poster from the American Psychological Association—the organization responsible for the conventions of the APA academic writing format—and on it were three putatively imperative guiding rules for student-writers (two of which I forget, though I think one was inclusivity); the third rule, however, I clearly remember: It was clarity, and below the explicit directive to be clear was a picture of completely still water in a translucent glass with, if I recall correctly (the clear-window of my memory seems to have opaque water-stains), small barely-perceptible oxygenated bubbles.

The glass was, evidently, representative of how language is meant to be employed when writing clearly, meaning words should get out of the way of the transmission of ideas, and the-thing-I-wish-to-express is only obscured by the language-I-must-use (one can detect an implicit undercurrent of resentment) to articulate it. Ideas were, if I’m following the pictorial metaphor (in its absolute transparency, permitting no misunderstanding of its utter taken-for-granted-ness and the viewers’ presupposed understanding), the water. Notions, thoughts, demands, and a litany of other modes of transmissible thought-material are the water-thing which language was (contemptuously; unfortunately) required for a recipient beyond oneself to gain access to.

I.

This injunction for clarity, in its simplicity, is clearly commonsense—it is a platitude, meaning the demand for clarity passes through language with no resistance, meaninglessly. Our cultural disposition towards clarity in writing tells us that we’re condemned to language (meaning we hate language—it is the prison of our thoughts, much like the platonic dualism that opposes soul and body, where the immaterial soul is imprisoned in materiality and the body should withdraw itself for the ‘true’ expression of one’s inner-spirit, though, given the fact of our embodiment, it is unclear how this withdrawal is possible) and we wish to get straight to the ideas using as little language as possible.

There is an intersubjective transmission at hand, from one to an-other, and the glass metaphor demands that the conduit facilitating this transfer (language, if it was not clear) should conceal itself and limit its presence to an absolute minimum. Language must be the conduit that denies itself of any conduit-hood—the conduit of language is postulated as a window (but a window which negates its own glass: a glass-less window with alleged direct access to the thing outside, a window that is nothing more than a hole).

If language moves aside (to return to the pedagogical implications), the student-writer’s essay on nursing ethics (for example) can shine through, like clear-water in a clear-glass (because, of course, we must inculcate students with a sense that nothing is clearer than the field of ethicality—that one will only encounter clear ethical problematics, in both their careers and interpersonal lives, which are totally dissoluble by a response; ethics must always, if it is clear, permit the possibility, or necessity, of its own resolution). There is nothing singular or idiosyncratic in APA’s injunction for clarity—it is entirely symptomatic of a cultural demand (the Law of clarity), presenting itself as common-sense and concealing an underlying mistrust of language. The Law of clarity forces us to repeat its catechism: When I must write, it will be done clearly. Or, in the affirmative-negative: I will not write unclearly.

I admit that “clarity,” as a kind of shorthand for “understandability for a given audience,” is entirely necessary when teaching students. As a professor who takes pedagogy seriously, teaching English courses, I insist on clarity in my practice. I think, especially for new college students, clarity in a certain register is necessary—where non-clarity is understood as a convoluted avoidance, recoiling from the content of a response to elide truth, like a student who adds superfluous ‘fluff’ content to a paper, or a politician who circuitously maneuvers a straight-forward question, refusing an affirmation or outright denial by content-less enunciations, lingering over qualifications and semantics to purposively occlude reason and a proper response. Undoubtedly, for certain fields, such as the ‘hard’ sciences that rely on replicability and quantification, brevity and conciseness are paramount: In a paper on cancer research, I agree that one should use the least number of words to describe what percentage of patients went into remission following treatment.

What constitutes clarity and its utility, in these cases, is clear. Writing, in this sense, should employ language proportionate to its meaning, with nothing superfluous to interfere (though another judgement, that of aesthetics and style, must go unnoted). My contention against the injunction for clarity is not against promoting understanding—I am asserting that a certain conception of what it means to be clear is implicitly antagonistic towards the place of language within writing, instead privileging ‘pure’ meaning.

I must ask: What of the tiny bubbles, floating near the lip of the glass in the pictorial metaphor? What does translucency do when confronted by a bubble, that which distorts all it encounters and has an inescapable degree of opacity? How can one ‘clearly’ represent these spheres of oxygen, submerged in water, refusing to be fixed in photographic stillness? The glass cannot clarify it, if by clarify we mean reduce the bubble to the lucidity of the water surrounding it. The bubble remains a bubble—an orb of partial inexplicability, resisting clarity and all attempts to render it a transparent water-thing.

I must also ask: Is language a glass-less window? Is it a conduit-less conduit? Is there not a material that thought is required to pass through to achieve any written intersubjective transmission? I’m referencing here—it should be clear—the materiality of language, namely, the orthographic signifier and the fact that the content of thought must pass through (or, rather, is formed by) a substance that is not thought itself. Insofar as it can be articulated through writing, meaning is inextricable from language. Language is constitutive of meaning: there is no meaning in writing outside of the language used to articulate it. Jacques Derrida famously insisted on this dimension of language, of the “materiality of a word” [1]. He explains that writing is falsely thought of as a “‘clothing’ . . . a dress of corruption and disguise, a festival mask that must be exorcised” [2].

Consider the expression of pain, which never seems to capitulate to clear expression. When in pain, I do not announce it using perfectly clear language—I am experiencing an acutely unpleasant sensation in my big toe—I emit a sound, a pre-linguistic animal-cry which indexes my pain (even if I use language, the signified of my language is not truly at play, it is only the level, or the pitch, of utterance that indexes the pain). The noise I emit is exactly that, a noise, not some syllogism articulating my pain in a logical series: X has hit my toe with Y amount of force, and I am experiencing the negative sensation of Z. Pain cannot be articulated this way and properly register the painfulness of pain to an-other. If I want to express this pain, so that it can be understood by an-other through writing, I’d need to offer them not a logical syllogism explaining my pain, but rather language that registers the pain in the same way as the pre-linguistic noise I reflexively utter.

Joan Didion, in her essay on migraines, titled “In Bed,” articulates pain in this way:

“I had no brain tumor, no eyestrain, no high blood pressure, nothing wrong with me at all: I simply had migraine headaches, and migraine headaches were, as everyone who did not have them knew, imaginary. I fought migraine then, ignored the warnings it sent, went to school and later to work in spite of it, sat through lectures in Middle English and presentations to advertisers with involuntary tears running down the right side of my face, threw up in washrooms, stumbled home by instinct, emptied ice trays onto my bed and tried to freeze the pain in my right temple, wished, only for a neurosurgeon who would do a lobotomy on house call, and cursed my imagination.”[3]

Two paragraphs later, she writes, “That no one dies of migraine seems, to someone deep into an attack, an ambiguous blessing.” The scrupulous reader should observe something analogous in this passage to a pre-linguistic scream of pain converted into meaning. Yes, this passage is clear (we should note here that being reluctant to totally concede writing to clarity—understood as the minimization of language used for articulation of thought—is not tacitly endorsing non-clarity), but her pain is not water in a clear glass. If it had been, Didion would have merely said: Those who do not have migraines think they are imaginary; I have migraines, and I attest they are not imaginary. Migraines hurt badly. (The “badly” may be too much glass.)

II.

In Ta-Nehisi Coates’ latest book, The Message—a message to his students at Howard University, a self-reflexive statement on writing itself, and a work of historical-journalism—we see him (a remarkable prose stylist in the restrained manner of many contemporary American writers), make this same demand for clarity. He writes,

“A belief in genius is a large part of what plagues us, and I have found that people widely praised for the power of their intellect are as likely to illuminate as they are to confound. ‘Genius’ may or may not help a writer whose job is, above all else, to clarify. A world made clear— . . .” [5]

Two pages later, appealing to his former students—who are all aspiring writers—he tells them: “There has to be something in you, something that hungers for clarity” (19). Coates analogizes (using a similar axiomatic assumption as APA) clarity as “light” (19), and this light-clarity can confront the accounts of “enslavers, colonizers, and villains” that “work best in the dark” (19). He writes that writers require “another standard—one that sees the sharpening of our writing as the sharpening of our quality of light” (19). Writing clearly, understood as bringing forth light, combats darkness, as that which seeks to conceal oppressive systems. (Clarity, as we see, is not only dealing with the expression of interiority.) The analogy of light brings in another sense of clarity: lucidity or intelligibility; to be clear, in this sense, means rendering the world intelligible for an-other. Yet, the earlier Law of clarity is also present here—of writing that does not “confound” (as the genius ostensibly does). Coates invokes a duplicity of clarity: clarity as intelligibility (bringing light) and simplicity (an aversion to confounding).

Pedagogically, there is a certain utility here: Coates is speaking to students who want to write, likely in the same journalistic mode he operates in, and specificity, directness, and other techniques that limit confusion are undoubtedly preferable to those which obfuscate. However, because Coates is a good writer, who effects the intersubjective expression from writer to reader, he refuses to submit his writing to the predetermined clarity of the stories already told, instead searching for the actual story—a true account corresponding to the facts (and facts are always lively, emerging from the tumultuous world of nature and human-affairs).

In the subsequent chapter, after the note to his students on the need for clarity, Coates visits Dakar, in Africa, and finds himself confessing: “I know what I said of clarity, about mapping the shape and content of words to feeling. But I confess that I have not yet found the words to capture the linkage” (61). This admission, less than halfway through his book and at the end of this chapter-essay, brings a set of questions: What is this “linkage” that he is unable to clearly ‘map’? And, if the writer’s responsibility is “above all else, to clarify,” how does Coates write a chapter in absence of this clarity he calls for? Far from criticizing Coates, I instead say this: Coates, in full self-awareness, violates his own rule (breaching the Law of clarity) precisely because he is a writer who does his “job” of articulating an account.

When Coates visits Dakar, he is contemplating the narrative of a 19th century slave-holding anthropologist named Josiah Nott, who sought to “prove” that Black people were “inferior and thus fit for enslavement” (29). For Nott, in order to ratify the system of slavery, it was essential that Black people were devoid of any historical claim to ‘advanced’ societies, and this assertion of inferiority is complicated by a concurrent interest in the “splendor” of ancient Egypt. At the same time Nott is denying the humanity of Africans, he is celebrating Egypt, and this leads to a simple historical account conveniently undoing the tension between these views, postulating that Black people were not present in Egypt “save as captives” (32).

Then emerges a counter-account, from African Americans in the 20th century: a “Black Egypt” that celebrates a “Black civilization” (35). Coates calls this historical assertion, of “utopic African origin” a “myth” that he is uncomfortable accepting (that has less to do with historicity than the predication of human dignity upon past civilizations). Both these accounts, the racist assertion and counter-assertion, are conspicuously clear: they superimpose a mythic quality onto reality. Coates is suspicious of these narratives for their reductive clarity. His trip to Africa is haunted by these myths, by Coates’s inability to anchor his experience onto any foothold of clarity.

Coates’ attempt to render an account of Dakar and African Americans’ socio-historical and experiential relation to Africa is the confrontation of a bubble within the glass: it is a resistive orb that defies clarity and conciseness. Coates does his job as a writer by refusing to simply resolve this bubble. I am not arguing that one should oppose Coates’ call for light-clarity—in the sense he defines it, using writing to render the world intelligible and illustrate the unintelligibility of racist narratives—I am instead saying that language never simply gets out of the way of this “light.”

I do not think I am defying Coates’ definition since he acknowledges that there is a “shape and content of words.” What else could this signify, if not the materiality of language—of the very impossibility of writing to be a transparent glass? In this chapter, Coates ratifies both the limitations of clarity and the material nature of language—he asserts its inability to cleanly “capture” every “linkage” and that words have a “shape and content.” In this case, an explicit statement of non-clarity, of the very impossibility of a clear articulation, brings “light” and intelligibility in a way a short logical statement could not. In this case, one dimension of clarity, light-lucidity, is only possible through a negation of its other dimension, the minimization of language for simplicity. The Law of clarity folds in on itself.

III.

Even the most linguistically simple sentence still must contend with the materiality of language, of its inherent “shape and content.” Often, all that putative clarity (here meaning simplicity of language) does is conceal, through minimization, the operation of language structuring its meaning. Writing My migraines are debilitating or I miss my grandfather does not offer a more direct access to meaning—it only offers less language. To be sure, less language is sometimes all that is needed (and surplus language can sometimes impede the intersubjective ‘transfer’ of meaning), and less language certainly does not always result in an attenuation of meaning. We are already aware this is the case, with famous paratactic sentences, such as “Jesus wept.” that are utterly abounding with meaning (though, despite its simplicity, I would contest the clarity of this biblical sentence). Unfortunately, the Law of clarity is not supple enough in its enforcement to permit this variance. Law, to stabilize itself, must be universalized.

Think of my own introduction, the opening paragraph of this essay: What if I had been “clear” (defined here as dispatching, through writing, a meaning by deploying the least number of words)? Would I have promoted greater understanding? Let’s view this paragraph (my own) submitted through the prism of clarity:

On my office wall was [Should I say “is” instead? For the sake of clarity?] a poster from the American Psychological Association with three rules [I suppose it doesn’t matter that I’ve forgotten the other two, does it?] for student writers. One of them was to be clear [It would be pointless to say, “in writing,” right?] and was represented by a glass of water [No description needed if one seeks to be clear].

I realize here, though, that I leave too much at the margins: Why does it matter what organization the poster was from or the image on it? To be truly clear, I should write this:

A poster told students to write clearly.

There—I think I’ve done it. There is nothing left to write; I’ve written too much already.

 

Notes:

[1] Derrida, Jacques. Of grammatology. Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. John Hopkins Press, 1997. P. 210

[2] Derrida, Jacques. Writing and difference. Translated by Alan Bass. University of Chicago Press, 1978. P. 35

[3] Didion, Joan. “In Bed.” The White Album, Simon and Schuster, 1979

[4] Coates, Ta-Nehisi. The Message. One World, 2024. P. 17