Clarity as a Revolutionary Gesture: Wordsworth, Coleridge, and the Exhaustion of Poststructuralism

Mucha’s Lyrical Ballads. AI-generated image

Introduction

For much of the twentieth century, suspicion toward language was not only legitimate but necessary. Structuralism, and later poststructuralism, made it unmistakably clear that meaning is not immediate, that it does not rest on a transcendental foundation, and that every act of expression is entangled with history, power, and difference. Yet when a critique outlives its historical urgency, it risks hardening into style, and eventually into habit. At that point, what began as a dismantling of illusion can congeal into rhetoric.

This article advances a simple but, in the current intellectual climate, somewhat uncomfortable thesis: after decades of sustained critique of meaning, clarity has become a genuinely contemporary, and indeed provocative, modern gesture.

Far from being naïve or regressive, clarity understood as responsible legibility can be fruitfully compared to the reaction articulated by Wordsworth and Coleridge against the artificial poetic diction of the late eighteenth century. In both moments, the impulse is the same: a response to rhetorical saturation that no longer serves thought but obscures it.

Two Moments of Linguistic Saturation

By the end of the eighteenth century, English poetry had become dominated by an ornamental diction sustained largely by inertia. Its conventions, once expressive, had drifted away from lived experience. Early Romanticism emerges as an explicit reaction against this exhaustion. In the Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800), Wordsworth formulates his break with remarkable precision:

“The language, too, of these men is adopted… because such men hourly communicate with the best objects from which the best part of language is originally derived.”

The aim was not to impoverish poetic language, but to release it from empty convention. Romantic criticism did not reject form as such; it resisted its automation.

A structurally similar situation can be observed today in theoretical discourse. After decades of semiotic analysis, deconstruction of presence, and critique of metaphysical foundations, many texts continue to operate as though this revelation had only just occurred. The result is a proliferation of neologisms, semantic displacements, and gestures of opacity that no longer open new problems but instead generate a fog around familiar ones.

Clarity Is Not Transparency

Defending clarity does not entail restoring an illusion of transparency or denying the complexity of language. After Saussure and Derrida, it is no longer possible to believe that meaning is given once and for all. Yet acknowledging this does not require turning writing into an exercise in illegibility.

Derrida himself was explicit on this point. One does not step outside metaphysics; one inhabits it strategically. This position does not license obscurity, but rather forecloses the fantasy of a pure exterior. Within this framework, clarity does not mean closing down meaning. It consists in making the trajectory of thought visible, rather than delegating it to an esotheric rhetoric accessible only to the already initiated.

The Contemporary Myth of the Ineffable

One of the more troubling features of current theoretical discourse is the recurrent gesture toward a “beyond” that cannot be articulated, yet to which certain thinkers claim privileged access. This posture, familiar and easily recognizable, reproduces a structure akin to mysticism: something essential cannot be said, but its presence is suggested through allusion.

Here it is crucial to distinguish between empirical limits and ontological ones. That certain phenomena lie beyond the unaided human senses does not render them ineffable in principle. Human experience has historically expanded through instruments, concepts, and increasingly precise forms of description. There is nothing inherently mystical about this process. Elevating difficulty into epistemic authority, by contrast, functions as a form of discursive insulation.

Ordinary Language as a Critical Gesture

When Wordsworth defends the “language of common men,” he is not advocating a return to immediacy. He is articulating an ethics of communication. Ordinary language is neither natural nor transparent, but it is shared, and this sharedness is a basic condition for understanding.

Coleridge, more attentive to philosophical speculation, was equally wary of confusing depth with obscurity. In Biographia Literaria, he draws a clear distinction between genuine difficulty and unnecessary darkness. Complex thought may, and often must, demand effort, but it should not demand initiation.

Today, writing clearly often requires renouncing certain symbolic rewards: the aura of mystery, the authority of the initiated, the protective shield of calculated ambiguity. Precisely because it carries this cost, clarity acquires critical force.

After Poststructuralism

One might describe our present moment as “post-poststructuralist,” though the label matters less than the diagnosis. We are no longer in the phase of discovering the instability of meaning, but in the repetition of that discovery as a marker of belonging. Under these conditions, continuing to write as though language had only just been problematized becomes redundant.

To speak clearly today is not to reject critique, but to presuppose it and move forward. It is not a return to naïveté, but an exercise in intellectual discipline.

Conclusion

After suspicion, clarity is not a regression but a form of rigor. Not because it restores full presence or stable meaning, but because it assumes responsibility for saying what can be said without turning opacity into spectacle. In a time, saturated with wordplay and gestures of depth, speaking clearly has become a quietly subversive act.

Bibliography

• Coleridge, S. T. (1817). Biographia Literaria. London.
• Derrida, J. (1967). De la grammatologie. Paris: Minuit.
• Derrida, J. (1972). Positions. Paris: Minuit.
• Wordsworth, W. (1800). Preface to Lyrical Ballads. London.