Last year, Triple Canopy published Alix Rule and David Levine’s “International Art English.”1 As a broad critique of globalized artspeak semantics, the essay has since sparked many debates around the exaggerated claims and imprecise promotional language of contemporary art. In this issue of e-flux journal, Martha Rosler and Hito

01/13 Steyerl each respond to Rule and Levine’s essay. đđđđđđđđđđ ***

If one examines Lacanist obscurity, one is faced with a choice: either reject capitalist Marxism or conclude that the significance of the poet is social comment. However, if neodialectic cultural theory holds, we have Martha Rosler to choose between subdialectic narrative and capitalist deappropriation. Marx suggests the use of the precultural English and All paradigm of discourse to challenge class That divisions.2 In 1974, sent Irwin Corey to Lincoln Center to accept the National Book Award citation for Pynchon’s novelđGravity’s Rainbow. Corey was a nationally known comic monologist billed as Professor Irwin Corey, the World’s Greatest Expert. He regularly delighted corporate audiences with double-talk speeches couched in the linguistic codes of their own fields of expertise. He was usually billed as an entertainer, but in “experiments” in which he was unleashed on unsuspecting audiences as a keynoter at professional conferences, he consistently gained high ratings from listeners, who did not grasp that he was retailing double- talk rather than presentingđa well-crafted argument in their own field.3 đđđđđđđđđđI was prompted to write the present article by a request to participate in a public conversation addressing Alix Rule and David Levine’s article “International Art English,” published in Triple Canopy. I was unable to participate but wound up jotting down some notes that led to this effort; my response is meant as complementary to Hito Steyerl’s essay, which takes a very different tack. While I reserve the right to consider the original article as an elaborate joke, one hardly needs to be reminded that jokes are often a cover for hostility, and the more elaborate the joke, the more powerful the hostility may be. Furthermore, jokes are often

e - f l u x j o r n a # 4 5 — m y 2 0 1 3 đ M t h R s E n g l i s h a d A T t intended to forge an alliance between the teller and the listener, at the expense of the butt of the joke. It’s one thing to critique double-talk as gobbledygook, a meaningless jumble of memes and phrases. It’s another to shine a negative spotlight on the word salad as a way of proving that theoretical discourse, or the very enterprise of theory, is a sham and a shame, a foreign import, or perhaps simply a fallen discourse.

06.01.13 / 20:00:16 EDT Professor Irwin Corey the “world's foremost authority,” accepts a National Book Award for Thomas Pynchon, 1974.

An immigrant makes breakfast, aided by instructional ESL materials from the YMCA, 1918.

06.01.13 / 20:00:17 EDT đđđđđđđđđđAt the turn of the twentieth century, millions stiff who cannot make the grade is a perennial of Europeans immigrating to the US were object of ridicule, gentle or otherwise; cases in subjected, along with their children, to point: Homer Simpson and his spiritual forebear, “Americanization,” which rested on learning the aircraft-wing riveter Chester A. Riley.6 In this English, and with it the rationalized work they join those others outside the wageđscale, discipline and obedience of office, factory, and thatđis women, old people, and children. retail workplaces, all of it orchestrated and presided over by experts. Management culture, still in its infancy, was an integral element of turn-of-the-twentieth-century industry, leading to the reworking of systems of shop-floor control such as obtained in the steel industry, and the intrusion of “efficiency experts” who came up with motion- and time-management systems, from time cards to rationalized movement to output demands. There developed one understanding of the English language as a privileged, historically rich, and expressive vehicle4 but also another understanding, a twin- set: an instrumentalized language of control and its corollary language of simplified commands. đđđđđđđđđđExpert culture and its workplace effects have been pilloried, parodied, and burlesqued in many artworks, including Chaplin’sđModern Times, Kingsley Amis’sđI’m All Right Jack,đCheaper By the Dozen (a friendly, comic look at the home life of motion-study experts Frank and Lillian Gilbreth and their twelve children, with the movie based on the book by a few of the children),đSpotswood (or,đThe Efficiency Expert), and Desk Set (where the villain is a computer, as it is in 2001: A Space Odyssey). In films likeđDie Blaue Engel andđHis Girl Friday, the professorial expert or his jargon is the target, as it is much earlier in the ridiculous figures of ’s Polonius, Voltaire’s Dr. Pangloss, the Houyhnhnms encountered by Gulliver – and surely somewhere in the Greek and Roman plays and in every other culture with hierarchies, Illustration from ‟A Voyage To The Country Of The Houyhnhnm” in stratifications, and so forth, which breed their Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. own discourses of power and jargons of access in exercising control over the workforce, whether slaves, contract workers, piece workers, đđđđđđđđđđThe universe of consumption provides a assembly-line workers, service workers, or wage host of areas in which specialized language has slaves. If Professor Irwin Corey (a lifelong radical great appeal. Nothing shows the power of who appeared at Liberty/Zuccotti Park in 2011, “expertise” more than organized sports, and men at age 97, to cheer on Occupy Wall Street) is a (primarily), young and old, learn to parse not only representative symbolic figure of that the precise rules but also the quantified actions understanding of discourses of power, Reggie and technical descriptions of sports, with their Watts (b. 1972), fusing multilingual double-talk recollections of military formations. For the more with scat singing and musical riffs, may be the pacific-minded, there is the language of film and best or at least the most prodigious television production, recently augmented by contemporary successor.5 Such parodic computer-derived jargons. performances will not vanish soon; the đđđđđđđđđđMigration of restricted discourses signifying discursive codes of management and the expert engagement, however, requires more than pretentious patter of the hypereducated are a mastery of linguistic tropes; to avoid sounding robust. One is always trying to get ahead of them, ridiculous, one must learn when, where, and and those subjected to them can mock them whether to deploy the terminology. Imitation, by with a burlesque flourish or with the scathing cliché the sincerest form of flattery, may produce mimicry of the outraged. Conversely, the working tortured language that unintentionally exposes

06.01.13 / 20:00:17 EDT one’s shortcomings. People aiming to sound asked a Berkeley linguistics professor to learned or informed are often not very good at expatiate on what we could learn from noting their highfalutin borrowings. who called the country we had just invadedđEye- đđđđđđđđđđThere are also those among the educated rack and who pronounced its nameđEErock. who hope to advance professionally by analyzing “Wrong question!” I wanted to yell at the radio. other disciplines’ inelegant linguistic Once again, I felt embarrassed by the peccadillos. Efforts to quantify linguistic inappropriate approach to matters linguistic, and patterns are surely deserving of suspicion when 04/13 this time it felt like a public shaming: this was not done by law enforcement trying to track what was broadcast to the world about the down a note-writing desperado or in approach of “my fellow Americans” to matters of cryptanalysis to decode a cipher, or in pursuit of invasion and destruction.8 another forensic usage, such as attempting to đđđđđđđđđđIn both these instances, the grabbing hold ascertain authorship. of linguistic tropes did not even manage to grasp đđđđđđđđđđI’ve tried one of these. When I was an the narrative. Instead, it amounted to a sleight of undergraduate at College, I was mind, a diversionary trick without a meaningful persuaded by my sociology tutor to perform a outcome. With respect to my own low-level statistical analysis of a poem7; I chose the Wordsworth analysis, it’s possible that, thanks to canonicalđTintern Abbey by Wordsworth. I can’t the scientism of the day, a statistical take might recall the parameters of the analysis, but both have seemed to give the analyst a jump on the my English tutor and I were embarrassed by the messy contingency ofđreading, especially in barrenness of the results. The parsing of contrast to the belletrist or New Criticism–based active/passive and other statistically available study of holy secular English literature in that measures did not lead me terribly far down the pre-postmodern moment.9 With respect to road of “understanding” romantic poetry. theđEye-rack /EErock divide, that might tell us a đđđđđđđđđđMany years later, in early 2003, I was living little about those who were either reporting on, in Stockholm and listening to a radio feed of reacting to, or fighting the war (a back door to a National Public Radio, the American public radio class analysis, perhaps), but this was no-news service; the hosts ofđAll Things Considered had passing as news, and I was upset at the nice

A machine for analyzing poetry, from "Automatic Analysis of Rhythmic Poetry with Applications to Generation and Translation," by E. Greene, T. Bodrumlu, and K. Knight. Proceedings of the 2010 conference on "Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing” (2010).

06.01.13 / 20:00:17 EDT Wall Street Institute promotional image.

Salt Crusted Beef Tenderloin Grilled in Cloth, from recipe blog Food 52.

06.01.13 / 20:00:17 EDT professor who had been persuaded to tell us delectable, dreamy, dulcet, divine, epicurean, about it in a serious tone of voice. Neither exquisite, and so forth. The list was long. Some linguistic geography nor social-class usage of its less recherché words can today be found would equip us to learn much about the real- online; one blog writer commented: “I taught a world exigent politics. In both cases, fixing on class on Hotel and Restaurant English a little words in a sanitized manner rendered them over a year ago at my college and created a list of peripheral rather than central to illuminating food descriptors for a Hotel and Restaurant ESL either a question of poetry or one of a gigantic, 06/13 class.” We’ll get to ESL in a moment. ongoing international war crime. đđđđđđđđđđDescriptive terms and phrases are the coin of the realm for copywriters, especially at demotic levels. Sniffing after the trail of press- release copy in the search for a diagnosis of a perceived art-world malady seems to misconstrue what a press release is and what it is designed to do or to be. It hardly needs to be said that a press release is a long-form piece of advertising copy, with embedded keywords. This is such a commonsensical understanding of linguistic folderol that moving the subject to the art-world press release impels the writers of the article under dissection here to try to reassure Dinner menu for Brooklyn restaurant Five Leaves. us, their readers, that what they are doing is not in fact merely a silly game – when it may very đđđđđđđđđđIn the early 1970s, we experienced a well be merely a silly game (cf. Irwin Corey).12 moment much like the present one, in which the đđđđđđđđđđOur diagnosticians note but may not quite middle class discovers it really, really loves food, understand that global English is a necessarily expensive food that helps its eaters feel superior simplified language, most useful for to lesser eaters the way sayingđEErock can make communicating simple ideas and instructions. you feel superior to those who sayđEye-rack. Below the guild secrecy of restricted Backđthen,đthis food was not mere food linguisticđcodes isđthe lexicon I referred to earlier, butđcuisine, the product of artistry and the one tailored to develop the subject position imagination. It smacked of magic even more than of controlled employees and others.13 A reduced skill and might be considered virtuous in its vocabulary is used to communicate instructions, relation both to producers and to the earth, as and nowadays these instructions are likely to be well as providing health-giving maintenance for in English. No surprise that in the present one’s precious bodily temple.10 conjuncture, a simplified international English đđđđđđđđđđWe used to joke that every adjective added has been developed as an instrumentalized to a dish on a chain-restaurant menu added language meant to enable non-native speakers another dollar to its cost. The temptation to pile or relatively uneducated or even just young on the adjectives persists. Here’s a restrained people to understand and perhaps follow simple example from the current menu of the Denny’s in instructions. Cambridge, Maryland: đđđđđđđđđđOn the website Simplified English: Key to Successful Internationalization, we find the THREE-DIP & CHIPS following: Three delicious flavors – mild salsa, queso con carne and warm, creamy spinach As usability professionals [sic] we know artichoke.đServed with crispy tortilla chips. that making text understandable is very challenging, especially in an international A somewhat more up-market café lists “Grass- environment. Simplified English can help. It fed organic bison with sautéed mushrooms and was developed to facilitate the use of melted Swiss on a home-baked roll.” maintenance manuals by non-native

đđđđđđđđđđFascinated by the visual and verbal e - f l u x j o r n a # 4 5 — m y 2 0 1 3 đ M t h R s E n g l i s h a d A T t speakers of English. Aerospace representations of food and its cultural roles, in manufacturers are required to write aircraft 1974, as part of a multi-course maintenance documentation in Simplified performance/installation work based on the English which: semiotics of the menu and the dish,11 I and a male partner alternated in reciting a list of adjectives for food drawn from aspirational reducesđambiguity, cookbooks and articles: ambrosial, aromatic, speedsđreading, awe-inspiring, choice, croquant, dainty, dazzling, greatlyđimproves understanding for people

06.01.13 / 20:00:17 EDT whose first language is not English, instructions such as those found in quite a few makesđtranslation cheaper, easier and Asian-manufactured goods. Look up “Chinglish” allows automated translation. on Wikipedia and you will find a distinction between “instrumental” and “ornamental”; in the latter instance, an almost randomly selected How it works: English word put in adjectival position will elevate the worth of a common item, much as

07/13 restaurants useđsmooth and crispy orđbraised It starts with a lexicon of approved words, orđhand-picked to raise the status and price of a Each word can only be used as the part of common-enough menu item (or more appositely, speech as defined: the wayđfinger-lickin’ orđlip-smackin’ help propel “close” is a verb, so: “Close the door” is the hordes to the drive-through fast-food correct, “do not go close to the landing window). The fetishistic use of word tokens as gear” is wrong, “do not go near the landing keywords is so widely recognized that websites gear” is acceptable. abound that offer “postmodernism generators” and other triplet combinations of recognizable jargon (adverb, adjective, noun).16 đ

Words can only be used with the approved meaning: “Follow” means to come after, so: “the puppy follows the adult,” is correct, “follow the safety rules” is wrong, “obey the safety rules” is acceptable.14

The site produces the following transformation of a paragraph:

Place the water heater in a clean, dry location as near as practical to the area of greatest heated water demand. Long uninsulated hot water lines can waste energy and water. Clearance for accessibility to permit inspection and servicing such as removing heating elements or checking controls must be provided.

Put the water heater in a clean, dry location

near the area where you use the most hot Haiku on a tea bottle. water. If the hot water lines are long and they do not have insulation, you will use too much energy and water. Make sure you đđđđđđđđđđAfter guiding us through the putative have access to the heating elements and sources of the international linguistic code as the controls for inspection and servicing. used in generally nonprofessionally written press releases for small art venues, the article under Applying theđFlesch-Kincaid Reading Ease score, discussion here finally reveals to us that the we find the first selection scored thirty-four out reductive use of this residual vocabulary of of one hundred, with one hundred being most Continental theory is sođliterally uninformative readable (readability increases as the numbers that it amounts to an inadvertent poetry of sorts. rise).15 On the Flesch-Kincaid grade-level index, đđđđđđđđđđBut ornamental language always strives for the original paragraph drew a grade level of a poetics; as I’ve maintained, the language is thirteen. Rewritten, the paragraph’s reading- meant not so much as a validation but as a way ease score hadđrisenđto fifty-five, and its grade of signaling the elevated niche in the particular level had dropped to ten. universe of discourse in which the writer hopes đđđđđđđđđđThe poetics of instruction manuals reside to position the work in question. (Even theđNew mostly in the boldly non-Standard imported York Times has a blog devoted to the “Haiku of

06.01.13 / 20:00:17 EDT the Day” drawn from headlines and copy in the happens to the pidgins of a global argot – day’s paper, and the definitively middlebrow “Roman,” I’ve often called our international public radio conglomerate WNYC runs promos global English – is that its users lose the poetics featuring broadcasters cooing out endorsement of a half-learned phrase as they are trained to “haikus” sent by donors. A hipster-oriented kefir professionalize and adopt the language of the company in New York prints a consumer haiku on proper social class of speakers, thereby losing its cartons.)đHaiku is claimed by the “creative the appeal of naive strivers,đOthers Who Fail. As a class” as the “quick” equivalent of 08/13 lieutenant class arises, its members, buckling noncommodified production. down to the inevitable lessons of work discipline đđđđđđđđđđPerhaps these flights of fancy represent the and consumer discipline, simply get better at underpaid, unspecialized copywriters’ attempts writing the instruction booklet and the to pull away from the clichés of the approved list descriptive sales pitch aimed at keeping, in and at the same time offer readers a tacit Pierre Bourdieu’s phrase, “the market in acknowledgment that the language, while space- symbolic goods” properly cordoned off and its filling, is neither particularly informative nor discourses shielded from the speech of the meaningful. The international language- street or even the market. instruction chain Wall Street English, while đđđđđđđđđđHigh-end venues, of course, do not need to featuring the British Union Jack in its logo – a pile on the descriptors; they don’t have to try so powerful symbol of imperial dominion and hard. They don’t even need to advertise on e-flux, propriety above all – reminds you by its very when they can buy an ad inđArtforum or pay a name that the point is Wall Street, i.e., financial critic to write an article of praise. They have acumen; learning the English lingua franca their established a reputation, and a rich clientele is way will provide you with an entrée into the not swayed by linguistic bling. To those folks, transnational world of money. If you consider the spending money comes easier, and designer echoes of Continental philosophy to signal words require no added emphasis. debased or fallen language, one wonders where đđđđđđđđđđTo continue the culinary example, here’s a else the writers of art ad copy would find their brief selection from the renowned Four Seasons vocabulary of approbation. But what inevitably restaurant in :

Entrance of Bergdorf Goodman department store in New York.

06.01.13 / 20:00:17 EDT decade or so ago, I opted out of the list.18 Paillard of Beef chimichurriđđ$55.00 đđđđđđđđđđPaeans to the glory of the English language Filet of Bison foie gras, perigord black periodically circulate.19 The spread of the trufflesđ $65.00 language may be traceable to colonialism, to be Three Lamb Chops roasted barley-root sure, but richness seemed to be the underlying vegetablesđđđ$65.00 reason for its success, and various English Ahi Burger mango-red onion salsađđđ$28.00 pidgins are adduced to testify to its generative

Sirloin Burger onion-thyme relishđđđ$38.00 09/13 power. In other words, the story of English is an evangelical gospel. In this vein, pidgins and If someone wants to complain that the art creoles develop spontaneously, and non-English market has so distorted the art world that all we speakers may enroll in Wall Street English have left in the wake of the death of critical lessons, buy Rosetta Stone language programs, engagement is the cannibalization of theory into or pursue other proprietary ways of learning a string of faux freshwater pearls, it would be English as a form of self-advancement or a better, I should think, to put together an article traveler’s luxury, but the teaching of English as a exploring that subject. This would be preferable second language (ESL) is another way to frame to basing a critique on a statistical model, or methodologies for providing the peons, strivers, worse, to comparing the sales pitches of and aspirants with the linguistic competence to hapless, underpaid, non-native English speakers be functional and compliant.20 to pornography. (A reminder here that for Kant, đđđđđđđđđđI find in the diagnosis of IAE a rigid the faculty of taste saves us from the formalism in which, in Jessica Mitford’s terms, U pornographic – roughly the desire to reach out and non-U21 English signal the status not only of and touch the object of aesthetic representation. the writersđbutđof the goods themselves, Taste has been resurrected, in what might be restricted to the delectation of the elite. If the called the biopolitical era, as the individual’s still-inelegant users are to be mocked, one might signature internal method of discerning the good as well mock the clerks in Bergdorf’s and similar amidst the field of the bad. I idly speculate that luxury stores who address the customers the article’s authors wish us to find lurking under asđmoddom as they sweep the goods into and out debased copy its users’ inferior taste because of the buyer’s sight. This deference is a condition their writing flows from an inauthentic borrowed of employment; without it you do not get through source.) the door. NeitherđOctober nor the Frankfurt đđđđđđđđđđIf, on the other hand, you want to go after School nor e-flux is responsible for the invention, international uses of English, here’s a thought: it elevation, or promulgation of Simplified Art Copy appears that the former English colonies in and its universalizing usage as the entrée into which English is the primary language and in the art world. It’s structural! Trader’s argot may which the art world lacks a significant never have been so widely disseminated, but it is indigenous market and in whichđnational (as merely symptomatic, a provisional opposed to minority-discourse ethnic) identity accommodation, and it would be nice to see the politics will get you nowhere, are hoping to dupe malady itself placed at the heart of such a people into a painful form of credentialism, discussion. persuading them that somehow obtaining đđđđđđđđđđWhat struck me most forcefully about the ađdoctorate in studio art will make you a better, article was that it churned up enough interest more employable and “showable” person – an among the chattering class to provoke some international player.đThis amountsđto teaching an members to imagine that the mandarins have up-sized version of Simplified Art Copywriting, something at stake in linguistic ornaments, and which one can apply to oneself and one’s that they themselves have something to defend. projects.17 In some places this mincing jargon Given the attacks on the humanities and their will land you a curatorial job. But it doesn’t hold a funding, those in the art world (and the “human candle to some of the brain-swelling gibberish sciences,” including sociology) would, one might that young art historians and curators – think, be more circumspect about picking up graduates of the very best elite US universities some of the tools of the delegitimators, such as who were also committed to Occupy Wall Street e - f l u x j o r n a # 4 5 — m y 2 0 1 3 đ M t h R s E n g l i s h a d A T t statistical analysis. But there are more – occupied themselves with in emails and aggressive “quant” challenges afoot. When Facebook chains during the high moments of the Obama rolled out (I use the military metaphor movement in fall 2011, scholastic strings of advisedly) his BRAIN initiative – Brain Research reasoning so turgid they defied my ability to through Advancing Innovative decipher their meaning or relevance. After a few Neurotechnologies, or the Brain Activity Map go-rounds, I withdrew from the conversation I’d Project – the intended result was not a positive been invited to join; similarly, after the first effect on medical research alone. Half the month of receiving e-flux’s announcements a government funding for this field comes from the

06.01.13 / 20:00:17 EDT Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects reactions, as we may one day be able to do. Agency (DARPA), and part of that agency’s Values could well change overnight.”24 rationale is the relatively unsubtle enhancement đđđđđđđđđđThe effects extend beyond the prestige and of soldiers’ performance on the battlefield, funding of humanities departments, long a target through the continued development of machine- of right-wingers, who see “theory” and critical brain interfaces.22 Neural research is also an studies as Marxist tinged and socially disruptive, important element in the technicalization of as well they might. While Rule and Levine point

“aesthetic” reception, including of literature, of 10/13 the finger at October and theorists such as the which statistical analysis was an early variant.23 Frankfurt School, so do those touting The newer versions acknowledge the popularity neuroanalysis and neuroesthetics, but with a of all things “neuro” (except “neurotic,” a good deal more scorn and malevolence. terminological/diagnostic remnant of the earlier, Neuroanalysis is also, like much linguistic and humanist approach to the mind). Semir Zeki, information-related research since at least the Professor of Neuroaesthetics at University Sputnik moment, another arm of military- College, London – the man who came up with the directed research.25 By virtue of hype and term “neuroaesthetics” and who has been given funding, it has more appeal than the fusty old a one-million-pound grant to further his research cogitations about “texts” and images, in part on “the ways in which beauty and art are because we are in another scientistic cultural functions of the physiology of the brain” – has moment, once again driven in part by the needs said: “art critics … may [feel threatened by my of the military – and roundly supported by the claim] that I know that most people will respond pharmaceutical and educational testing to the beauty of the human figure when it is industries. A relatively long-standing initiative in painted in a particular way because of the way this regard came not from the Left-bashers and receptors are distributed,” but it is “auction humanities-haters, but from the Marxist scholar house directors who should be more fearful”: Franco Moretti. Moretti, based at Stanford “Imagine if … you had a priori knowledge of which University, established the Center for the Study paintings were actually objectively liked or of the Novel in 2000 and, as a logical outgrowth, disliked by people through scanning their in 2010 cofounded the Stanford Literary Lab,

UK edition of Alan Sokal's book with Jean Bricmont, Intellectual Impostures (2003), laying out their attack on postmodernism.

06.01.13 / 20:00:17 EDT which “discusses, designs, and pursues literary since Galileo, been formulated in the research of a digital and quantitative nature.”26 language of mathematics.đButđwhose The Lab uses statistical analyses, but Moretti’s mathematics?đThe question is a aim is broader: to establish a sort of natural fundamental one, for, as Aronowitz has history of literary forms, using quantitative observed, “neither logic nor mathematics measures of large data sets, scientific escapes the ‘contamination’ of the social.” hypotheses, and so on. The genealogy of efforts And as feminist thinkers have repeatedly to bring scientific method to studies of literature 11/13 pointed out, in the present culture this is far too complex to explore here. Critics of contamination is overwhelmingly capitalist, Moretti’s research have included others on the patriarchal and militaristic: ”mathematics Left; Christopher Prendergast, for example, in is portrayed as a woman whose nature 2005, while noting the importance of scientific desires to be the conquered Other.” Thus, a methods of investigation to previous generations liberatory science cannot be complete of Marxist scholars, suggested that Moretti’s without a profound revision of the canon of project amounted to a social Darwinism of the mathematics. As yet no such emancipatory evolution of literary form, an impossible attempt mathematics exists, and we can only at naturalization.27 speculate upon its eventual content. We đđđđđđđđđđIn light of the movement toward other forms can see hints of it in the multidimensional of quantification, the relatively simple statistical and nonlinear logic of fuzzy systems theory; methods employed by Rule and Levine look but this approach is still heavily marked by somewhat benign, though no less antihumanist. its origins in the crisis of late-capitalist Pillorying the qualitative methods, theoretical production relations. Catastrophe theory programs, and descriptive efforts pursued in with its dialectical emphases on nonscientific fields is often both necessary and smoothness/discontinuity and useful. I will end, however, by offering a reminder metamorphosis/unfolding, will indubitably that critiques and lofty-sounding parodies can play a major role in the future mathematics; be highly damaging when stealthily advanced to but much theoretical work remains to be blow up a discourse. Samuel Beckett (in 1930) done before this approach can become a and many others in various fields, including art, concrete tool of progressive political have published bogus papers, mostly as praxis.31 malicious acts.28Often these are aimed at what is perceived as a threatening language × promulgated by “the Left.” But my final example, like that of Moretti’s research, stems from the Left. It is a quotation from the fake analysis of the social construction of science submitted by physicist (and anti-deconstructionist) Alan Sokal to the journal Social Text, where it was duly published, while elsewhere it was simultaneously exposed as gibberish by Sokal himself.29 Causing a huge international splash at the time, Sokal’s article had at least a temporarily deleterious effect on the nascent field of cultural studies, especially when it hit the mainstream press, distracting attention from its areas of investigation and painting it as frivolous with the broadest of brushes.30 Here we see a weak link, admittedly a noxious pastiche of what might be called “vocabularyism,” confected to sink the entire enterprise by the postmodern moment’s Irwin Corey. While junior Simplified Art

Copy writers may be guilty of unwittingly e - f l u x j o r n a # 4 5 — m y 2 0 1 3 đ M t h R s E n g l i s h a d A T t assembling pretentious lofty verbal concatenations, that sad symptom hardly serves to discredit the entire field.

[T]heđcontent of any science is profoundly constrained by the language within which its discourses are formulated; and mainstream Western physical science has,

06.01.13 / 20:00:17 EDT Martha Rosler is an artist who works with multiple đđđđđđ1 online tool used by Rule and media, including photography, sculpture, video, and Triple Canopy 16 (July Levine, which they characterize 2012).đSeeđhttp://canopycano as a “concordance generator,” installation. Her interests are centered on the public pycanopy.com/16/internationa claims to work “at the sphere and landscapes of everyday life – actual and l_art_english. intersection of corpus and virtual – especially as they affect women. Related computational linguistics”; in projects focus on housing, on the one hand, and đđđđđđ2 the case of IAE, the “corpus” Generated was e-flux’s online press systems of transportation, on the other. She has long byđhttp://www.elsewhere.org/ releases. Even back in the produced works on war and the “national security pomo/. 1960s, when I was performing climate,” connecting everyday experiences at home my sophomoric analysis, 12/13 đđđđđđ3 statistical linguistic analysis with the conduct of war abroad. Other works, from bus To see a transcript of Corey’s was meant not as a literary tool tours to sculptural recreations of architectural details, speech, exactly, but as a precursor to are excavations of history. visitđhttp://www.irwincorey. computerized machine org/routines.html. I have no idea translation and, like almost all how the talk was received. In government-funded linguistic fact, there are many such research, including that of Noam examples of successful Chomsky, was aiming for an discursive hoaxes, in different eventual military/AI application. forms; I return to this below. Since then, a whole universe of linguistic modeling has opened đđđđđđ4 up. On the study of this English, see Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory đđđđđđIt may be worth noting, in (Minneapolis, MN: Univ. of passing, that theđjob of Minnesota Press, 1983). copyeditor, and other jobs dependent on the command of đđđđđđ5 natural language, Among other forms of linguistic aređperpetually under threat of improvisation, scat talking and supplantation by computer scat singing are ages old. Scat programs. Fields with singing was practiced in the specialized technical modern era in the US by Jelly- vocabularies and terms of art Roll Morton and Al Jolson (see have also seen the development Wikipedia) and robustly during of computer-generated language the Jazz Age by Cab Calloway, processors such asđhttp://mlp- Louis Armstrong, the fabulous xml.sourceforg e.net/. Ella Fitzgerald, Anita O’Day, Mel Tormé, Carmen MacRae, Betty đđđđđđ10 Carter, and later by the Something like the ads in Whole “vocalese” trio Lambert, Foods, a supermarket chain Hendricks & Ross, the Swingle whose very name ripples out Singers, and hosts of others; the from the Whole Earth Catalog of rock ‘n’ roller Dion; and of course hippie days. Bobby McFerrin, and some hip- hop artists. Between double-talk đđđđđđ11 and scatting is poetry, from A Gourmet Experience, 1974. Gertrude Stein to the Language (or L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E) poets, đđđđđđ12 and Edith Sitwell, Lord Buckley, Rule and Levine, joking or not, and Captain Beefheart, but are hardly sophisticated perhaps not including non- linguistic commentators. They bardic monologuists from Jean attack the generative process of Shepherd to David Antin to nominalization, but Spaulding Gray or the contemporary English is rife with mellifluous nonsense poets such strange nominalizations, so as Edward Lear or even Lewis much so that theđNew York Times Carroll. Sunday Book Review, in a recent article on the process, ridicules, đđđđđđ6 among other coinage, the And related old-timey television neologisticđfail (for failure) characters such as Ralph andđsequester (for Kramden and more so his pal Ed sequestration). (See Henry Norton, Fred Flintstone, and the Hitchings, “Those Irritating rube puppet Mortimer Snerd; by Verbs-as-Nouns,” March 30, virtue of “allowing” us to mock 2013, and his subsequent “The them, they become fetishized. Dark Side of Verbs-as-Nouns,” April 5, 2013; theđTimes has đđđđđđ7 addressed this issue repeatedly I was in an experimental over recent years, but we should program at Brooklyn College, remember that journalism modeled on the Britishđsystem, amuses itself by pillorying thatđincorporated a tutorial academe.) Our writers also approach to higher education. inexplicably fail to recognize the increasing prominence of the đđđđđđ8 wordđspace in many disciplines, Clearly, I am ignoring the including psychology and its pop

e - f l u x j o r n a # 4 5 — m y 2 0 1 3 đ M t h R s E n g l i s h a d A T t difference between grammatical versions, since the 1960s. In that and phonetic analyses here. vein, one might consider the importance to many đđđđđđ9 contemporary theories of the That is, in contrast to a privileging of space over time (cf. personalized humanistic reading Henri Lefebvre, David Harvey, on the one hand, and to a and others) in contemporary formalist myopia on the other. A capitalism. Thus we may expect statistical study of Wordsworth’s philosophically inflected corpora corpus rather than a single poem to have more terms relating might have led to some insights tođspatiality than tođtemporality. about his work, but I am not Rule and Levine also note the persuaded. Sketch Engine, the prevalence of dependent

06.01.13 / 20:00:17 EDT clauses, particularly as (Robin) Breckenridge Ware Cohen, “Next Big Thing in published in theđNew Left sentence openers, but what McNeil. The message was the English: Knowing They Know Review. For a later, non- academicized writing fails to richness of the language, whose That You Know,”đNew York Times, theoretical critique, see Kathryn employ these? Why else is productivity and immense Mar 31, Schulz, “Distant Reading,”đNew Microsoft Word always vocabulary (dually sourced from 2010,đhttp://www.nytimes.com York TimesSunday Book Review, beseeching us to abandon their Norse/Germanic and Greco- /2010/04/01/books/01lit.html June 26, 2011, p. 14; published use, along with high-flown Roman roots) is the story behind ?_r=0; “Can ‘Neuro Lit Crit’ Save online as “What Is Distant padding, which is also attacked the story of English dominance. the Humanities?” by the editors Reading?” June 24, by Rule and Levine? Finally, their This is little more than the of theđNew York 2011,đhttp://www.nytimes.com comments on the wordđtext are imperialist imaginary at work. TimesOpinionator blog, Apr. 5, /2011/06/26/books/review/the - close to unintelligible. 2010,đhttp://roomfordebate.b mechanic-muse-what-is-dista

đđđđđđ20 13/13 logs.nytimes.com/2010/04/05/ nt-reading.html?pagewanted=a đđđđđđ13 This is not the place to consider can-neuro-lit-crit-save-the- ll&_r=0. See also Elif Batuman, The military is well-known for its the ways in which the humanities/; and Tim Adams, “Adventures of a Man of Science: idiosyncratic language of terminology, or designation, of “Neuroaesthetics,” published on Moretti in California,”đn+1 issue euphemistic substitutions English as a second language the blog Blouin Artinfo, April 23, 3 (Fall 2006) and published (“collateral damage, enhanced (ESL) has been sliced and diced, 2009,đhttp://www.blouinartin online (Apr 23, 2010) interrogation, targeted killing”), and in some cases replaced by fo.com/news/story/30849/neur atđhttp://nplusonemag.com/ad the most outrageous of which is ESOL (English for speakers of oaesthetics/. ventures-man-science. the renaming of the War other languages), EAL (English Batuman distinguishes formal Department as the Defense as an additional language), ESD đđđđđđ24 Tim Adams, ibid. For a look literary development from Department; see also (English as a second dialect), EIL at a recent neuroaesthetic Darwinian natural selection, as Godard’sđAlphaville for the (English as an international reading of literature, see Kay does Prendergast’s essay, and poetics of philosophical and language), ELF (English as a Young,đImaging Minds: The notes that Moretti does not mind emotional impoverishment lingua franca), ESP (English for Neuro-Aesthetics of Austen, the loss of a “human” element in abetted by selective lexical specific purposes), or even EAP Eliot, and Hardy (Columbus: Ohio such studies. reduction, which no doubt is (English for academic purposes). State University Press, 2010), derived from the “Newspeak” of See the Wikipedia entry for available George Orwell’s novelđ1984 and English as a second or foreign atđhttps://ohiostatepress.or đđđđđđ28 his postwar ur-texts on politics language, which is chock-full of g/Books/Book%20PDFs/Young%20 Judith Rodenbeck has directed and language. variants and their Imagining.pdf. On this my attention to the acronyms:đhttp://en.wikipedi bandwagon one finds Marina magazineđNovember, parodying đđđđđđ14 a.org/wiki/ESL. Abramović; after people sat October – a target of Rule and The slight barbarisms of staring into her eyes for Levine – whichđput out a single language are as quoted; the đđđđđđ21 extended periods, often bursting issue in 2006. It featured articles original formatting is worse. “Upper class” and “not upper into tears, duringđThe Artist is by “Lukács G.C. Hechnoh,” Seeđhttp://www.userlab.com/S class.” Present (2010), her performance “Rosamund Kauffmann,” and E.html. at MoMA, Abramović became “Chip Chapman” (respectively, đđđđđđ22 President Obama, in his interested in somehow making Benjamin Buchloh, Rosalind đđđđđđ15 speech of April 2, 2013 on the visible the brain function Krauss, and Hal Foster). J. Peter Kincaid is one of the BRAIN initiative, announced an involved in “the transfer of authors of the document, initial expenditure of $100 energy between performer and đđđđđđ29 written in 1992, from which the million for 2014 and a projected public.” Supported by the “Transgressing the Boundaries: Simplified English example was total of $3 billion over the Mortimer D. Sackler Family Towards a Transformative drawn. I believe the Microsoft decade. (See “Remarks by the Foundation, Abramović worked Hermeneutics of Quantum Word dictionary, in trying to get President on the BRAIN Initiative with US and Russian scientists Gravity,” Social Text readers to reword their and American on “an experimental (Spring/Summer 1996). Sokal paragraphs to produce less Innovation,”đhttp://www.whit performance installation” at published his self-exposé in passive constructions, grades ehouse.gov/the-press-office/ Moscow’s Garage. The Lingua Franca in the May 1996 the results using theđFlesch- 2013/04/02/remarks-president - installation was issue. Kincaid Reading Ease score. brain-initiative-and-americ an- calledđMeasuring the Magic of innovation.) The European Union Mutual Gaze (2011). See Marina đđđđđđ30 đđđđđđ16 got there slightly earlier, Abramović, “Neuroscience The article under discussion See the opening epigraph and announcing in January 2013 the Experiment I: Measuring The here, “International Art English,” the closing quotation of the Human Brain Project, on which it Magic of Mutual Gaze,” on the gained a second life when the present article. expects to spend $1 billion over Abramović-Garage authors were interviewed in the coming decade. (See John websiteđhttp://abramovic.gar theđGuardian newspaper. đđđđđđ17 Horgan, “Why You Should Care ageccc.com/en/works/10. She The US has few art-making about Pentagon Funding of and New York public radio talk- đđđđđđ31 programs that offer a doctorate, Obama’s BRAIN Initiative,” show host Brian Lehrer sat, In case it is not abundantly clear, except in supposedly non- Scientific American Cross-Check wired up and gazing across at let me reiterate that theđbook- market-oriented fields such as blog, May 22, one another during a radio endđquotations gracing the “social practice.” Some are 2103,đhttp://blogs.scientifi broadcast; the resulting present essay are, in the first floating the idea that this added camerican.com/cross-check/20 discussion can be heard instance, the machinic product credential is necessary to 13/05/22/why-you-should-care atđhttp://www.wnyc.org/shows of a generative computer catapult its holders above the -about-pentagon-funding-of-o /bl/2013/mar/13/neuroscience - program, and in the second, Alan MFA crowd when it comes to bamas-brain-initiative/, and his and-art. Sokal’s devilish foray into academic jobs. Caution makes earlier posts linked therein.) gobbledygook/double-talk. me refrain from adducing Some sources suggest that the Seeđhttp://www.physics.nyu.e examples of self-descriptions by National Institutes of Health đđđđđđ25 Hats off to Greg Sholette du/faculty/sokal/transgress_ such hyper-educated people already spends about $5.5 for his reinsertion of the Sputnik v2/transgress_v2_singlefile. that look even worse than the billion yearly on neuroscientific effect into art discourse. Much html. bad examples offered by Rule research. (See Jason Koebler, of the funding in linguistics and and Levine. “Obama's $100 Million BRAIN related fields stemmed from the Initiative Barely Makes a Dent in legislation passed to respond to đđđđđđ18 Neuroresearch Budget,”đUS this Cold War space race. In my effort to stem email News & World Report, April 3, overload, I also routinely request 2013,đhttp://www.usnews.com/

to be removed from gallery and news/articles/2013/04/02/oba e - f l u x j o r n a # 4 5 — m y 2 0 1 3 đ M t h R s E n g l i s h a d A T t đđđđđđ26 Seeđhttp://litlab.stanford.e artist announcements. I don’t mas-100-million-brain-initia du/. For a sample of a pamphlet appreciate bloat. But I digress. tive-barely-makes-a-dent-in- put out by the lab, neuroresearch-budget.) seeđhttp://litlab.stanford.e đđđđđđ19 du/LiteraryLabPamphlet1.pdf. In the mid-1980s, as globalization became a topic, đđđđđđ23 See Alyssa Quart’s the public television summary “Adventures in đđđđđđ27 Christopher Prendergast, “miniseries”đThe Story of English Neurohumanities,”đThe Nation, “Evolution and Literary History: developed from a book by the May 27, A Response to Franco same name written by a former 2013,đhttp://www.thenation.c Moretti,”đNew Left Review 34 US public television news co- om/article/174221/adventures - (July/August 2005); much of host, the Canadian-born Robert neurohumanities; Patricia Moretti’s work had been also

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