Moving toward Cha's DICTEE

a quotation from Trinh T. Minh-ha's _Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism_, as quoted by Juliana Spahr in her chapter on Cha in _Everybody's Autonomy: Connective Reading and Collective Identity_ (U of Alabama P, 2001). 119-120.

Nothing could be more normative, more logical, and more authoritarian than, for example, the (politically) revolutionary poetry or prose that speaks of revolution in the form of commands or in the well-behaved, steeped-in-convention language of "clarity."

Clarity as a purely rhetorical attribute serves the purpose of a classical feature in language, namely, its instrumentality. To write is to communicate, express, witness, impose, instruct, redeem, or save--at any rate to _mean_ and to send out _an unambiguous message_. Writing thus reduced to a mere vehicle of thought may be _used_ to orient toward a goal or to sustain an act, but it does not constitute an act in itself. This is how the division between the writer/the intellectual and the activists/the masses becomes possible. To use the language well, says the voice of literacy, cherish its classical form. Do not choose the off-beat at the cost of clarity. Obscurity is an imposition on the reader. True, but beware when you cross railroad tracks for one train may hide another train. Clarity is a means of subjection, a quality both of official, taught language and of correct writing, two old mates of power: together they flow, together they flower, vertically, to impose an order.

[Responses, anyone?]

Susan