The Clear and the Obscure.

"…… it is enough to evoke the fad for rapid reading and the habitual conscious or unconscious skimming of newspaper and advertising slogans, for us to understand the deeper social reasons for the stubborn insistence of modern poetry on the materiality and density of language, on words felt not as transparency but rather as things in themselves. So also in the realm of philosophy the bristling jargon of seemingly private languages is to be evaluated against the advertising copybook recommendations of ‘clarity’ as the essence of ‘good writing’: whereas the latter seek to hurry the reader past his own received ideas, difficulty is inscribed in the former as a sign of the effort which must be made to think real thoughts".

(Fredric Jameson)



“A writer will find that the more precisely, conscientiously, appropriately he expresses himself, the more obscure the literary result is thought, whereas a loose and irresponsible formulation will automatically meet with certain understanding […] Shoddiness that drifts with the flow of familiar speech is taken as a sign of relevance and contact: people know what they want because they know what other people want [..] Anything specific, not taken from pre-existing patterns, appears inconsiderate, a symptom of eccentricity, almost of confusion […] Only what they do not first need to understand they consider understandable; only the word coined by commerce, and already alienated, touches them as familiar.”

(Theodor Adorno)