> that's fine, do literature then. Do not present it as philosophy.
You're not understanding that the distinction between literature and philosophy is a false opposition of concepts; a good philosophical work answers not only to the philosophical commitments of the author, but also stylistic and linguistic ones. The style itself is part of the philosophy. So when Adorno and Debord write against the culture industry, it would be almost ironic if they were to use the style of the industry. They snubbed the industry in everything they did, and that included writing.
>The Capital does not need to be deciphered.
But it does! For the past century there have been debates as to the actual logical unfolding of concepts in the book, what certain words mean, where and how certain things are "proved", and the relation of the order of the chapters book to Hegel's Logic or even Dante's Inferno. The fact that the draft for Vol. 3 was written before Vol. 1 was sent to the publishers is also important. My point is this: philology and hermeneutics are very important in so-called "continental" philosophy and critical theory.
>All the other fields of applicable knowledge understand the need to define words clearly. Why would philosophy be an exception?
I'd argue that it shouldn't be the exception - other fields should be more like philosophy. The fact of the matter is that some concepts can only be understood in totality, not in isolation from one another and expressed axiomatically in sentences. The breadth and abstractness of the material precludes most instances of expressing something as "x means y" so directly. But the more important point is that the unfolding of the concepts, their logical presentation, has to do with the reality of the concept. Unlike formal logic in which syntax and semantics are separated, other logical systems (such as the one used by Marx) trace the concept through its exposition. The book, effectively, mirrors reality - going from more abstract to more concrete.
This is why philosophy being "updated" and reformulated makes no sense, it would mean that the concepts are torn apart. When you re-write a text, you lose an aspect of the presentation which readers generally agree is core to the ideas being presented. Ironically, even the people who do reformulate reformulate it in a different logical order[0] - but only because they realize the method of presentation is core to the concept being expressed.
Anyway, the idea that what we do "now" in philosphy and science is necessarily better than what we did before is dubious, to say the least. The reduction of philosophy to formal-logic statements only means that philosophy has been reduced to just another field under the calculation and quantification of modern society. It loses its stylistic and revolutionary character.
And yeah, I agree that Lady Gaga's meat dress is philosophically interesting, possibly even linked to what Debord and Adorno wrote about. You can talk about Lady Gaga's meat dress through Debord's conception of the spectacle, Adorno's conceeption of the cultural industry, Althusser's conception of ideological state apparatuses, or Marx's conception of the reproduction of society or "opium of the people". What makes the works to fecund is their abstractness and extensibility, and you only get half of that when you start expressing the concepts divorced from society and history (such as in formal logic).
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kozo_Uno#Thought