CONSIDER these two passages - the first, from Albert Einstein's 'popular' account of relativity and subtitled, amazingly enough, A Clear Explanation That Anyone Can Understand, and the second from the French philosopher Jacques Derrida.

Einstein: 'Let us suppose... that we know the space-time course for any natural process whatsoever, as regards the manner in which it takes place in the Galilean domain relative to a Galilean body of reference K.

'By means of purely theoretical operations... we are then able to find how this known natural process appears, as seen from a reference body K which is accelerated relatively to K. But since a gravitational field exists with respect to this new body of reference K, our consideration also teaches us how the gravitational field influences the process studied.'

Derrida: 'The living present springs forth out of its non-identity with itself and from the possibility of a retentional trace. It is always already a trace.

'The trace cannot be thought out on the basis of a simple present whose life would be within itself; the self of the living present is primordially a trace. The trace is not an attribute; we cannot say that the self of the living present primordially is it.

 

'Being primordial must be thought on the basis of the trace, and not the reverse. This proto-writing is at work at the origin of sense. Sense, being temporal in nature... is never simply present; it is always already engaged in the movement of the trace, that is, in the order of signification.'

Question: Which of these two specimens is likely to be condemned as jargon?

The answer is obvious. Most people would assume Einstein's relativity theories are beyond their ken. They would readily concede his language is difficult because his subject is difficult.

Nobody would dream of describing his language as jargon, for we know its unfamiliarity is due to its highly technical nature. If we cannot understand it, we would assume it's our fault, not Einstein's.

Many, even academics, would resist approaching Derrida with a similar humility. His writings have been described as 'murky', 'turgid', 'baffling', 'obscure', 'notoriously difficult' - all epithets liberally hurled by the New York Times (NYT) in its obituary of the philosopher, who died in October at the age of 74.

The Times' unstated assumption was clear: Philosophers have no business using such technical language. If we cannot understand their language - 'retentional trace', 'proto-writing', 'signification' - it is because they are being intentionally obscure, not because we are ignorant.

Mr Derrida, the founder of a school of philosophy called Deconstruction, stands condemned as a jargon-ridden writer.

The NYT is not the only newspaper which makes such assumptions. I can't count the number of times I have heard colleagues in this newspaper dismiss the writings of some academic in the humanities as 'jargon'.

Come to think of it, I can't count the number of times I have heard academics dismiss the writings of other academics in the humanities as 'jargon'.

The assumption seems to be universal: People in the humanities ought to write transparent prose accessible to reasonably well-educated people.

The possibility that even the humanities can have specialised languages specific to themselves is discounted.

Geneticists can have such a language, neurologists can, physicists certainly, economists can write what would appear to be gibberish to most people, but not philosophers, historians, sociologists, political scientists or literary critics.

It is obvious why. All of us are, to some degree or another, philosopher manques, part-time historians, coffee-shop political scientists, dinner-table literary critics. It is not possible, however, to be a part-time physicist, geneticist or neurosurgeon.

We know that to be any of these, we have to undergo prolonged specialised training. We acknowledge there cannot be amateur opinions in physics or neurology, only expert opinions. So we readily accept the specialised languages of these disciplines for what they are - necessarily different from ordinary language.

When it comes to the humanities, however, we are not inclined to be so diffident. The professional philosopher or historian, we assume, is different from us only in degree, not kind.

The political scientist or sociologist, we like to believe, is merely someone who knows more than we do about matters that belong to the public realm.

It stands to reason therefore that their writings should be transparent and accessible. And if they aren't, they are 'jargon'.

It is an altogether convenient thesis. The truth, of course, is that what appears to be jargon is often an exact specialised language, as essential for producing and codifying knowledge in the humanities and the social sciences as are the specialised languages of the hard sciences.

As Harvard University's Ms Marjorie Garber wrote: 'The history of jargon is the history of ideas in the making.'

The sociologist who called a 'poor boy' an 'underprivileged pre-adolescent' (to use an example author George Orwell cited once) was guilty of pretentious, bad writing, but the sociologist who coined 'meritocracy' in the 1950s made a significant contribution to understanding industrialised societies.

Similarly, every strange formulation in the Derridean passage quoted above may seem like a ghastly carbuncle on the face of the English language. But to someone who has taken the trouble to study Derrida, each has a precise meaning and contributes to a significant new insight into language.

Whether one agrees with that insight, or thinks it is valuable, is a different matter, but dismissing the whole as 'jargon' is simply lazy.

Jargon, incidentally, comes from the Old French jargoun, meaning 'warbling of birds', and was borrowed by Middle English to mean 'twittering, chattering'.

I'm not so sure it wasn't the New York Times that was guilty of jargoun in so easily dismissing Derrida's works as murky and obscure.

Return to top

IMPORTANT CONCEPTS