From Bad Writing’s Back by Mark Bauerlein :

Still, despite the mannered presentation, Just Being Difficult? and previous pro-theory statements do forward responses that deserve a hearing. Theorists devote long paragraphs to them, but they can be distilled into blank assertions and treated as hypotheses. They are:

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Scientists have their jargon—why can’t theorists have theirs?
Again, this is a valid question with a simple pragmatic answer. The public tolerates scientific jargon and not theory jargon because it believes that scientists need jargon to extend their researches and produce practical knowledge that benefits all. Only when scientists appear to abandon the common good does their language come under attack (for example, Swift’s portrait of mathematicians in Book III of Gulliver’s Travels, or contemporary ridicule of sociologese and psychobabble). Come the day when the theorists are able to demonstrate that their jargon enhances human life, and isn’t just pretension and science-envy, public mistrust of them will end. Constantly claiming to foment social justice isn’t sufficient.

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The United States is an anti-intellectual nation, and its national publications follow the trend.
Most theorists take American anti-intellectualism for granted, and Brooks suggests that cultural journals have adopted the Right-wing view, although “there is perhaps no point in lamenting the decadence of the serious cultural journals since journals of any sort mainly go unread at present”. This is silly academic parochialism as its most cocksure. Theorists who lament the absence of serious criticism in the magazines and newspapers should limit their point to the fact that their version of criticism has no public venue. In truth, learned criticism appears in magazines and newspapers all the time. The New Republic (circulation 100,000 a week) publishes lengthy review-essays on scholarly subjects by humanities professors (e.g., David Bromwich, David Freedberg, and Lawrence Lipking), as does the New York Review of Books. The Nation publishes art criticism by Arthur Danto and literary essays by Morris Dickstein; and reviews in Atlantic Monthly by Benjamin Schwarz and others meet high intellectual standards. Wall Street Journal editor Erich Eichman allows academic reviewers 800 words on university press books covering unusual subjects, and the Los Angeles Times and Boston Globe have deliberately raised the content of their weekly reviews. Moreover, although Commentary and The New Criterion haven’t the subscriptions of the others, like the now-closed Partisan Review in earlier times, their influence reaches to politicians and public intellectuals. Dutton’s own webpage, Arts and Letters Daily, receives over two million page views per month. I could go on, but suffice it to say that the notion that public discourse in the U.S. is vulgar and decadent is an absurdity that academics should give up immediately.

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With Hulme, creative artists break down the “standardised perception,” then “induce us to make the same effort ourselves and make us see what they see.” He doesn’t consider the case of the artist who works alone, forever estranged from the crowd. Adorno doesn’t talk about social success in the same way, but we can judge his effect simply by naming the people he influenced. These include not only contemporary theorists but also mid-century mass culture critics Dwight Macdonald, Clement Greenberg, Irving Howe, and others centered around Partisan Review—an audience skeptical and dogged enough to verify his brilliance.

We should apply the pragmatic test to today’s theorists. What if in the end nobody abandons common sense and adopts the theory habit? Butler aims to “provoke new ways of looking” and Culler repeats Emerson’s dictum, “Truly speaking, it is not instruction but provocation that I can receive from another soul,” but what if nobody is provoked? This is not quite the same verdict that Leftist critics of bad writing such as Katha Pollitt, draw, namely, that the theorists’ recondite language cuts them off from real politics. Rather, it recalls the simple truth that, as a matter of historical record, only certain disruptions thwart common sense and alter the world. In a word, the “anti-styles” only work if they create as well as destroy. If ordinary language is a repository of naturalized values, then the artist/critic’s counter-language must supply other values in infectious, admissible ways: one common sense world collapses only if another takes its place. If you propose to explode certain attitudes and beliefs, and to do so by disrupting their proper idiom, then you must compose a language compelling, powerful, memorable, witty, striking, or poignant enough to supplant it. Your language must be an attractive substitute, or else nobody will echo it.

Needless to say, the theorists haven’t achieved that and never will. A genuine displacement comes about through an original and stunning expression containing arresting thoughts and feelings, not through the collective idiom of an academic clique smoothly imitated by a throng of aspiring theorists. [emph mine] The writings of Pound, Mallarmé, Faulkner, and H.D. each form a unique signature and inspire theorists to daring interrogations, but few idioms are as conventionalized as 1990s critical theory. In her op-ed, Butler mentions slavery as a common-sense notion that had to go (Warner echoes the self-inflating comparison), but none of the abolitionists followed the “difficult writing” strategy. Frederick Douglass was a dazzling rhetorician, and Warner’s example, Thoreau, composed epigrams honored for their pithy brilliance. By comparison, theory prose is a clunker. Its success in the academy lies not in surprising conversions of common-sense minds, but in quick and easy replication by AbDs. If critics assume a duty to undermine common sense, very well, but they need to devise a different counter-speech, not insist on the value of their current one.