Abstract
Academics in the social sciences often treat writing as something which happens after all the interesting action has taken place, which is a bit like treating cooking as the dull business which happens after the collection of ingredients. In this splendid book, which I’m going to make compulsory reading for anyone who crosses my path, Michael Billig shows us just how important writing is. This isn’t merely a question of ‘style’, a rather tricky matter to define anyway, but an extended argument concerning the ways in which the words we choose and the order we put them in produces a certain sort of text. What is produced by the modern academic is a text which fits with the needs of a particular kind of worker in the modern university. Not a stunning insight, for anyone remotely persuaded that language matters in the construction of the social, but one rarely reflected upon very hard when the desire for a line on a CV nestles up next to the interests of reviewers, editors and publishers.
The substance of the book concerns the ways in which the language used by social scientists has a series of characteristics that make it rather useful for people who need to be seen to be saying something important. So, for example, the use of jargon and acronyms ensures that we can recognize academic writing as being different from other forms of writing, and hence that the people who engage in this kind of writing understand themselves as special because outsiders can’t understand it. Mastery of the language signifies the mystery of the craft. And this is a finely granulated social world, because within the social sciences, and within particular social sciences, there are specialist sub-genres in which academics use particular words and drop certain names precisely in order to demonstrate that they are members of this community and deserve to be allowed to go to a particular conference or be published in a particular journal. (Such as Organization, with its expectations about how you show that you are being ‘critical’, for example.) A further feature of this sort of writing is that it produces big nouns, and prefers sentences in the passive voice. Actual people who do verbs evaporate, and are replaced by reified, nominalized and passivized concepts such as reification, nominalization and passivization. (Because Billig enjoys the irony of show and tell.).
Fifty years ago, Charles Wright Mills took Talcott Parsons, the most influential sociologist of his day, to task for fetishizing concepts and failing to connect them with what people actually do. In the appendix to his book The Sociological Imagination, Mills complained that ‘in academic circles today anyone who tries to write in a widely intelligible way is liable to be condemned as a “mere literary man”, or, worse still, “a mere journalist”’(1959: 218). Billig’s lovely little book is intelligible. In fact, one might even accuse it of being well written, at the points when he really lets himself go and splits an infinitive.
Whatever actions that people may have performed seem to fade from sight when the big linguistic ships—the mediatizations and deterritorializations—are launched down the slipway into the oceans of theory. There, these great liners sail on and on, miles from the ports that teem with human life. They seem to be curiously deserted: no captain can be seen at the helm, no crew members swabbing down the decks, no passengers sunning themselves. Yet, on they massively go. (p. 112)
Like Orwell, in his essay ‘Politics and the English Language’ (1946), Billig concludes his book by offering six suggestions—write simply, use active sentences, don’t make things into nouns by adding ‘ization’, populate the texts with people, don’t become too attached to technical terms, and, break all these rules if you need to in order to construct a good sentence.
A spirit of quiet sadness permeates the book, punctuated with flashes of anger. This is not just a book about writing, but a book which diagnoses the conditions of possibility for such writing. It asks what purposes this sort of writing serves. Billig might not like the style of your average journal article, but his complaints are not primarily aesthetic. It is the fact that ‘you have to study long and hard to write this badly’ (p. 11) which is the problem, so the prose he dissects becomes a symptom of a much bigger issue, the reduction of intelligence to ‘output’ (Parker, 2014). There are some moments in the book which are very powerful, because they are said quietly and insistently, by a clever old man who insists he is doing no more than standing by the side of the road ‘muttering at the traffic’. So when Billig claims that we inhabit ‘a culture in which success and boasting go hand in hand’ (p. 5), it is difficult not to reflect on your own practices, on CVs, impact, journal ranking lists and Google Scholar.
All that matters is that I am mentioned, again and again. It gets worse. Sometimes, I have compared my scores with those of others. I am pleased if I am mentioned in more articles than they are, and my mood will be spoiled if their numbers surpass mine. It is as if I am pathetically pleading with the academic world: ‘Please, please mention me; you only need to mention me in passing; just drop my name; I don’t care where or how; just mention me, please; oh, and don’t bother mentioning Dr X or Professor Y’. Do I really think like this? Do I really care about the numbers? Yes, I must do. What a knob head. (p. 155)
He repeatedly compares much academic writing to a form of marketing, to the sort of language which is intended to sell things by claiming that ‘critical discourse analysis’ does something that nothing else can do, that ‘governmentality’ hits the spot, or that Pepsi is better than Coke. And when he moves on to his own turf, social psychology, his criticisms of the ways in which the arts of concealing and exaggerating are built into the structure of arguments and statistics about (that doubled word) ‘significance’ are pretty damning.
The power and charm of the book is that the author shows and tells his complicity in all this. He is not finger pointing from a distance. Sometimes, we catch a glimpse of another way of being an academic. One which is quieter, slower, lonelier. One in which people didn’t jump on planes, and invent words, and compare h-indices, and then write as if they were selling concepts and outputs like mobile phone contracts. There are some things I didn’t like. I didn’t like the way he used commas, for example, but am prepared to forgive. I would also like a serious discussion with the author about the status of big words in social science. Some big concepts, it seems to me are useful but very hard to populate or make into verbs. Take ‘social class’. Now we could insist that every time it was mentioned, it is made into something that someone does to someone else. The problem is that there do seem to be some concepts—‘structural’ or ‘systemic’ ones—which are rather useful. Durkheim called some of them ‘social facts’, and I think this argument needs to accommodate such matters, and not implicitly suggest that all concepts need to be active and populated. So when Billig, and his fellow traveller Howard Becker (1986), display a preference for the active voice over the passive, there is a theory at work here too, and I want it brought out into the open. I want to know what I am buying, and what I can’t do with it.
I really like this book though. In saying that I disagree with his use of commas, and some other things, I am doing no more than displaying the conventions of the academic book review because the reviewer always knows better. I know better about another thing too. I want Billig to be wrong in his pessimism about the difference this book could make, and that’s why I want you to read it. It’s easy to read, but makes you think hard, and contains some lovely rude words in entirely inappropriate places.
… serious academics consider it taboo to use these terms. We take ourselves far too seriously to deman ourselves by using unseemly, inferior language. Knob heads. (p. 156)