Clarity and work

It occurs to me that discussions of "clarity" usually implicitly hinge on the following assumption:

Difficulty for the writer means ease for the reader; ease for the writer means difficulty for the reader.

This is why accusations that writing is unclear so often devolve into accusations of authorial laziness, and why defenses of dense writing so often hint that the aggrieved readers are lazy. This is why the discussion so easily becomes moralistic. (Work is after all a moral category.)

It isn't at all clear to me (modernist that I am) that it is easy to write dense prose, though. How does it change the discussion about clarity, if we bracket the above premise?

It seems to me that the popular mistrust of critics, especially when they write using specialized language, is structurally similar to popular mistrust of difficult writers like Gertrude Stein. Like that of Stein, the critic's status as a worker is always in question, and the critic's claim to cultural legitimacy is therefore always threatened.

We need to revisit the structures of feeling around work.