ABSTRACT
This chapter treats two characteristics of sentence formation within the poetics of clarity, namely the privileging of the declarative sentence and the banishment of poetic devices such as metaphors. First, the construction of sentences is discussed in the light of Lyotard’s philosophy of phrases. Following Lyotard, perhaps the poetics of clarity can be understood as a genre of discourse that inscribes thinking within a specific teleological constraint and homogenises it to a cognitive descriptive endeavour that reduces how the world can be presented. Second, a restrictive organisation of knowledge production that (ideally) expels poetic devices such as metaphors potentially limits the development of thinking within academia. Knowledge production needs metaphors to progress, but thereby it cannot be removed from poetic devices that entails the danger of misunderstanding. Thinking must take risks to progress.
