Schwierige Texte in Kritik und Vermittlung
Authors: Engelmeier Hanna 
Published: July 2023

This article deals with constellations of critique and the critiqued in conflicts over difficult texts. To this end, conflicts are observed in which difficulty is treated as a problem of comprehensibility of texts, which not only concerns stylistics, but also has an ethical dimension. However, the fact that difficult texts require explanation rather than being mediated conveyed is not only a cause for criticism, but also an occasion to prove the competence of the critic.

Criticism of obscuritas or obscurity is a familiar topos in the history of rhetoric. The discussion of texts designated as difficult has taken place mainly implicitly in research on intelligibility and incomprehensibility. The relevant works deal primarily with the rhetoric and aesthetics of not only literary, but also philosophical texts. Difficulty emerges as a phenomenon that makes special demands on competence in reading texts (in the emphatic sense), a feature that can irritate readers.

This irritation is by no means always judged negatively, as research has shown, particularly with regard to modernist literature, and here especially with regard to poetry. The difficult text, in its manifestation as an incomprehensible text, has been rehabilitated once again since the 20th century as evidence of special poetic quality. At the same time, difficulty also fulfills a function for hermeneutic and aesthetic theory formation, initiating new approaches again and again. Discussions about the comprehensibility of texts – and high or low difficulty as a criterion for comprehensibility – exhibit a strongly self-reflexive character: What appears to be in need of explanation is not only what a text has to offer in terms of form, aesthetics, or content (and what may make it incomprehensible or difficult), but also the role of the person who comments on this text as a critic or defender.

The paper discusses this constellation on the basis of cases in which the normative dimension of the criterion of difficulty is mobilized in politically charged academic disputes. In the process, it becomes clear that accusations of tactical difficulty are made again and again. George Steiner described tactical difficulty as a procedure that he attributed primarily to literary avant-gardes, which he did not necessarily regard as negative. For Steiner, this meant texts whose authors use references, vocabulary, and rhetorical devices to force their readers to approach the work through other mediating texts such as commentaries. Steiner sees another motivation for the application of such tactical difficulty in the pressure for artistic innovation on the part of authors, who, against the backdrop of literary history, are left with only the path to particularly complex codifications in order to lend their work an original signature.

In the first part of the paper, tactical difficulty is reconstructed alongside the other types of textual difficulty that George Steiner developed heuristically in his essay ›On Difficulty‹ (1978). In addition to tactical difficulty, Steiner distinguished contingent, modal, and ontological difficulty. The latter is present, for example, in hermetic texts that resist comprehension by the very fact that it is difficult to paraphrase them. Modal difficulty concerns the challenges of readers in approaching a text across great historical distance and new literary preferences.

Tactical difficulties are the focus of the following sections of the paper. The second section focuses on the dynamics that can develop from the attribution of such difficulties when they are treated not solely as a phenomenon that occurs in literary texts, but also in scientific texts. In this context, ethical questions arise in a particular way. I illustrate this point using the so-called Sokal affair (1996) as an example. Through a parodic contribution, the physicist Alan Sokal took it upon himself to denounce the merely apparent difficulty of the texts of some poststructuralist authors as a tactical maneuver with serious epistemic consequences.

The accusation of this form of tactical difficulty has been raised regularly ever since. As an example, in the third section, the article takes up a dispute between Martha Nussbaum and Judith Butler (1999), who accused Nussbaum of evading criticism of her concept of gender by mystifying it and thus doing considerable damage to feminist concerns. Butler responded in a paper in which she emphasized the value of difficulty. This value, in her view, consists in the fact that the work of mediation that a difficult text requires indicates that the linguistic formulation of political concerns in particular cannot be common sense. With Adorno, she characterizes the call for common sense as a feature of potentially totalitarian societies.

An update follows in the fourth section, based on a contemporary example. A review in one of Germany’s largest daily newspapers (2022) criticized an issue of theZeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft(Journal of Media Studies), which, for the first time in its existence, systematically addressed the question of discrimination against minority groups in its own field. The review points out that the criticism of difficult texts is repeated in a stereotypical manner, and that such criticism has become formulaic to a certain extent. Here, normative dimensions of textual difficulty are brought to bear above all in disputes in which the discourses of political movements are reflected in particular modes of writing.