When Fluency Became Suspicious

To Flaw, Therefore I Am

The sentence was read aloud in a classroom, written by a student the night before, and it was broken in the small ways that sentences break: a clause collapsed under its own weight, a noun repeated twice within three lines because the writer hadn’t yet found the second one, a rhythm that tripped where a rhythm was supposed to land. Then someone — a teacher, I think, though the story has passed through enough tellings that the speaker keeps changing — said the thing that would once have been a complaint. That sounds human. Nobody laughed. That is the part I keep returning to, the absence of laughter. A joke requires an audience that already agrees on the direction of the reversal, and no one in that room agreed on anything, because there was nothing to agree about. The judgment had simply flipped, mid-term, in plain sight, and the flip went unremarked the way paradigm shifts go unremarked while they are still weather.

I have tried to let that sentence go and I can’t. That sounds human. Notice what it is doing. It does not praise the writing. It does not quite describe it either. It classifies: it files the sentence in a taxonomy whose categories are no longer good and bad but made and found, and then it discovers that the good has migrated to the wrong column.

For most of the time that anyone has been writing prose in the West, the moving sentence was evidence of a mind at work. The smooth period was a Roman virtue before it was anything else: rhythm held across a subordinate clause, a verb placed where the ear wanted it, all of it delivered with the ease that tells you the speaker is not currently holding it up. Ease was the signal because ease is expensive. Nobody fakes a long balanced sentence in a language they are still chewing.

Bourdieu saw the economics of this with unnerving patience. Fluency was never only a skill; it was a class trait worn so comfortably that it stopped registering as a trait at all. The habitus acquires it slowly — in rooms where certain books lie about unremarkably, across years of correction by people whose corrections you never hear as corrections — and then it displays itself as spontaneous, as the body’s own manner. That is the entire trick of cultural capital: the effort is real and every visible trace of the effort must be deleted. The educated person stumbles in the right places, having learned where to stumble so thoroughly that the learning has been erased from the performance. Mastery had a look, and the look was effortlessness, and effortlessness was the look precisely because you could spend a childhood buying it.

Barthes put the body back into the sentence, which is what he was always trying to do. Style, in his account, is not the mastery of form but the return of something that precedes the will: the grain of a voice, its rasp and breath, the parts of writing that come up from underneath rather than down from the rule. The smooth period was prized for exactly the opposite reason. It was the evidence of a will with no rasp left in it, everything sanded off, the throat cleared of itself. And yet both arrangements agreed on one premise — that the surface of a prose reports the condition of its maker. You read the sentence and inferred the throat. The inference was reliable enough that it stopped being an inference and became a convention, and a convention is something you can lose without ever noticing that you were holding it.

The machine arrived fluent. Nobody had prepared for that, because the old prophecy said the machines would produce the broken line: the brute output, the scraped-together string, the pastiche without a pulse. What arrived instead was the average of everyone. Every corpus ingested, every cadence weighted, the whole of written English compressed into a distribution from which the next plausible word is sampled. And the sampling is smooth. It is smooth the way water is smooth, because nothing in it has ever met an obstacle.

Here is the reversal, stated as cleanly as I can state it. Fluency used to be the excess — the surplus of control over mere communication, the thing you could do and did not have to do, and therefore the mark of someone in particular. It is now the norm: the expected product of a system whose entire purpose is to produce the expected. Coherence, once the hard emblem of disciplined thought, is what you get for sampling correctly. Balanced clauses, a paragraph that develops, a conclusion that closes — each was a virtue earned slowly, and each is now a behavior a detector looks for. The virtues have been reclassified as signatures. The better the paragraph, the stronger the case against it.

Shklovsky’s remedy turns over in the grave he dug for it. Defamiliarization was the answer to a different kind of automation — the perceptual kind, the daily wearing-down in which you stop seeing the stone because you have named it, and naming is a shortcut. Art’s job was to restore the stone’s stoniness, to lengthen perception by making it hard, so that the object arrives again instead of being recognized. The device was difficulty. Difficulty renewed contact with the thing.

Difficulty now works for a different employer. It no longer renews the reader’s contact with the world; it certifies the writer’s contact with a body. The stroke of strangeness has been redirected from the object to the origin. I make the sentence unfamiliar, and the unfamiliarity functions as a signature — not see the stone but see the hand. The writer who wants to be read as a person must apply the old technique to themselves and defamiliarize their own prose until it stutters, because the stutter is the only part of the page left with fingerprints on it. Difficulty stopped being a device for seeing and became a biometric.

Adorno earns the cruelest turn here, since he was the one who made difficulty sound like a moral position. For Adorno the hard sentence was a refusal: an insistence that the administered world’s reconciliations are false, that prose which flows too easily has already accepted the terms of the culture producing it, that the tangle in a line of poetry is a small resistance to being made palatable. Difficulty stood against false reconciliation. It was a way of refusing to lie with your grammar. The difficult work withheld the comfort that would let you take the arrangement for granted, and the withholding was the point.

Now difficulty is demanded. The demand is explicit, procedural, and comes with a deadline. Show us where it is hard. Prove the difficulty is yours. A new aesthetic regime has formed in which error, embarrassment, local opacity, the sentence that will not quite turn — these are valued as they never were before, and not for any value Adorno would have granted them. They are prized because they certify a body, and the body has become the asset. Imperfection has been detached from whatever it might mean and attached to whatever it might indicate: someone with a history wrote this, someone locatable in a crowd of averages. The flinch is worth more than the flourish.

Here is the paragraph I have been circling. The deviations previously penalized — the non-native accent, the syntax carrying a grammar’s habits across from another language, the colloquial tic, the stammer, the long inventory of the ways a person was once measured and found short — are now being read as proof of humanity. The writer who was corrected for it is invited to leave it in. The writer who was told the sentence was clumsy is asked to keep the clumsiness, because the clumsiness demonstrates. This is a specific injury and it deserves its own name, because the wound is no longer that you are suspected. The wound is that you are used. The stigma becomes a resource the moment the apparatus runs short of authenticity elsewhere, and it is harvested with the same neutral interest a passport office takes in a photograph. Somebody’s difficulty, which cost them something to have, gets signed for like a delivery.

Which is where this essay has to fail.

Here is the trap, stated plainly. This essay about the suspicion of fluency has been written fluently. Its sentences were revised; its movements were arranged; the reversals land where reversals are supposed to land. Every property it has just finished diagnosing as incriminating, it has performed — from the first line, before it had said anything at all. To be persuasive on this subject it must seem flawed, and to seem flawed it must be controlled, because a flaw produced on cue is the most refined control available. So the essay has wanted, since the classroom scene, to fail on command: to drop a clause here, let a repetition stand there, write one paragraph badly enough that you could put your hand on it and say there.

Watch the attempt. Here is a sentence I have failed on purpose: the writer is asked to be a certain way and the asking is the sound of the floor moving under them floor. There. Broken. Collapsed clause, doubled noun, the bones showing where the polish gave out. And you read it exactly as this essay says you now read everything — for intention — and you found me standing over the break with my prints on both halves. A failure is only a failure before it is chosen. Once I select it, cut it, place it, and point at it, it has joined the economy it meant to escape. It is fluency in the register of flaw, and it is more suspect than the smooth sentence, because the smooth sentence at least does not advertise.

So the desire gets registered rather than obeyed, and registering is not a way out, only an honest description of the wall. The trap cannot be shown from outside, since showing is authorship and authorship is what is in question. I could ruin the next paragraph and I would only be finishing it.

The only honest sentence here would be the failed one. So: I have failed this sentence, on purpose. You will not believe me — which is exactly why it’s honest, and exactly why it doesn’t work.