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There's a tactic I use, both in teaching and in writing, similar to one derived in the 1960s by a group of French writers who worked under the group name OuLiPo.1 The group emphasized constraint as a writing technique—writing without the letter "e," for example, or without "the." These constraints were meant to catalyze imagination and propel creativity, to bump habits of language sufficiently to create space for the emergence of something unexpected, something new. My version is less oriented toward novelty but is aligned in the aims of defamiliarization: it is to impose the constraint of not using the familiar terms of a given critical lexicon, to withhold common critical terms and thereby interrupt habits of thought, and by doing so, to prompt the greater specificity that can come of having to use more and different words. So, for example, I ask that classroom discussions and analytic writing be free of "problematic" and "ideological" and "interesting," with the understanding that everything is problematic, ideological, and interesting, and that our jobs as teachers and students and scholars is to understand and explain how and why and with what consequences. We know that terms that once had critical leverage can become dulled with use, so this practice of withholding extends to keywords, too: Can we describe neoliberalism without using the term? What does "queer" mean and do in a given context? To what are you/we referring when you/we speak of race? Racialization? Racism? And so on.
I've found this tactic to be helpful in eliciting specificity and clarity—or sometimes simply awareness of their absence—in part because it creates a pause in which more textured thought might form. Words are so dense, so full not only of meaning but also of the worlds in and out of which meaning takes shape and has weight, that withholding them, through a process indebted to Raymond Williams's take on keywords, can allow us entry to the conditions and debates and desires and exigencies that constitute worlds; this is the proposition put into operation by this tactic.2 It is a means by which to activate the energies underlying the emergence of key terms, the energies that are so often sapped by dint of their sedimentation. Withholding in this...