academic language is often purposely obfuscated

i reject the true/false dichotomy ;)

lol English

"purposely obfuscated"

my eighth graders hate when I talk like that

"discourse"

would be better if we said "intercourse" rather than "discourse"

"the conga"

ftr i don't think "is the language obfuscated" is a question that was ever really disagreed upon in that other thread

"okay kids the radical interruption of historicist time has deterritorialized the hegemonic structure of the pedagogic umwelt."

"..."

"it's break time ffs."

purposely, tho

http://wordminer.us/wp-content/uploads/2007/09/comic-2.jpg

Seriously, why don't you guys just all fuck off and die?

lol

well you can vote 'false'...it's a poll

So is the idea that if you write vaguely enough you can't be wrong? Or is it so you can always accuse your detractors of missing the point?

im not gonna say that there's no bad academic writing. there's a hell of a lot of it!

but i feel like the vast majority of cases stem from an attention to precision at the expense of, say, normal syntax. as i said on the other thread, try writing about this stuff yourself and see what happens to YOUR writing.

voted "false" -- also, that comic perfectly sums up the empty smugness that was calvin and hobbes

ha -- most of the academic writing to which I was exposed in grad school avoided precision!

I mean the journal articles of other tenured faculty, not Barthes.

so what kind of academic writing are we talking about here - let me guess, humanities?

Ok, ppl are gonna have feelings and whatnot in this thread, but let's not say anything about Calvin & Hobbes that we might regret later.

leading question

problematic poll

so what kind of academic writing are we talking about here - let me guess, humanities?

Yup. Lit is the worst.

a problematizing poll.

points for calvin and hobbes

Here's the Judith Butler glob iatee posted in the other thread:

“The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.”

Apparently this is award-worthy obfuscation. Is there no way to further parse this sentence to the author's satisfaction; or, is it the point to make the reader re-read the sentence a dozen times in order to even start to grasp even what is going on there; or, is it perfectly clear what this means to everybody but me :/

Yup. Lit is the worst.

― Exile in lolville (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Wednesday, February 15, 2012 9:50 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark

so what is the purpose of literary criticism?

To get tenure.

haha

she's simply using a lot of highly technical terms. even stuff like "totalities" that is a word we all know is still doing specific philosophical work in that passage. the sentence itself isnt the climax of an argument (that i can tell) but basically laying some ground work for what comes later. a lot of her readers know this story already.

I'm not sure the writer knows what a climax is.

Seriously, why don't you guys just all fuck off and die?

― emil.y, Thursday, February 16, 2012 2:41 AM (13 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Cartoonish--truthfully, probably the worst scene in a great film--but somewhat related:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6utMlqMCkg

char*d,A[9876];char*d,A[9876];char*d,A[9876];char*d,A[9876];char*d,A[9876];char
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~l),srand (l),~l),srand (l),~l),and ,!(l),~l),a ,!(A,l),~l) ,!(d=A,l),~l)
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-(r+o):(+w,_+ A-(r+o)+w,_+*( A-(r+o)+w,_+ A-(r=e+o)+w,_+ A-(r+o)+wri,_+ A-(r+o)
+(o)+b)),!write+(o)+b,!wri,(te+(o)+b,!write+(o=_)+b,!write+(o)+b,!((write+(o)+b
-b+*h)(1,A+b,!!-b+*h),A+b,((!!-b+*h),A+b,!!-b+((*h),A+b,!!-b+*h),A-++b,!!-b+*h)
, a >T^l,( o-95, a >T,( o-=+95, a >T,( o-95, a)) >T,( o-95, a >T,(w? o-95, a >T
++ &&r:b<<2+a ++ &&b<<2+a+w ++ &&b<<2+w ++ ) &&b<<2+w ++ &&b<<((2+w ++ &&
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i feel very sorry for problematic, a perfectly good and useful word so very soiled by a billion undergrads who don't know how to use it properly.

+(o=_)+b

"good work"

she's simply using a lot of highly technical terms. even stuff like "totalities" that is a word we all know is still doing specific philosophical work in that passage. the sentence itself isnt the climax of an argument (that i can tell) but basically laying some ground work for what comes later. a lot of her readers know this story already.

― ryan, Wednesday, February 15, 2012 9:55 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark

yeah, this, really. if you happened upon a paper written by an engineer about fluid dynamics, or a paper by a legal scholar expounding on the activity/inactivity doctrine of the commerce clause in constitutional law, or the role of historicism in history, you wouldn't level the charge of 'purposeful obfuscation'...

the people in the zones that butler moves in are all familiar with these terms, have been socialized into the circle. there's an internal vocabulary and language at work here. I don't see why we should resent them for that.

Most objectionable neologism ending in "-ize"

poor bachelard, he meant so well. :(

no I get it, but in my job I worry constantly about neologism creep.

dayo - the difference is you can't rewrite a paper about fluid dynamics to make it readable for 'yr average college grad', but you can rewrite that paragraph to make it much more readable without losing any nuance. I forgot where, somebody did it, I will look 4 it.

I think using problematic wrongly is just hilarious tho

well, not hilarious but mildly funny

eh, but that form of arguing - using syntax in that way - is a standard accepted form of post-structuralist argument. the fact that you may be able to reduce it to simpler sentences doesn't mean that academics in the field should be precluded, or should feel precluded, from using it

the fact that nearly-unreadable syntax is 'the standard' is where the 'purposely obfuscated' comes in tho.

it should be noticed she's telling a story there that is SUPER condensed. I don't know the whole context but it seems to be about the transition from structuralist to post-structuralist critique in Marxist criticism. the specific way she is describing that transitions will, I imagine, have a bearing on her argument.

in other words: context matters, a whole lot. and that context often extends beyond just the essay or book you are reading. we can't re-tell the whole history of the world anew every time we speak.

sorry for typos.

the fact that nearly-unreadable syntax is 'the standard' is where the 'purposely obfuscated' comes in tho.

― iatee, Wednesday, February 15, 2012 10:06 PM (28 seconds ago) Bookmark

yeah but to call it 'purposely obfuscated' is kind of lazy + facile - implying that it's obfuscation for the sake of obfuscation. there are deeper objectives at work here

language obfuscates. period.

my take on this has always been "jargon obfuscates," rather than language as a whole

been reading all this stuff with one eye and 2% of attention, so sorry if that point has been made already

http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/transgress_v2/transgress_v2_singlefile.html

"Wise men pierce this rotten diction and fasten words again to visible things."

Ralph Waldo Emerson

humanities academia is a hobby of sorts, so if they have their own CB radio lingo more power to 'em. any idea worth talking about can be expressed in clear, simple language.

Is this language not clear and simple enough for you?

Seriously, why don't you guys just all fuck off and die?

― emil.y, Thursday, February 16, 2012 2:41 AM (13 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

― emil.y, Thursday, February 16, 2012 2:55 AM (15 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Elementary education can hold its own with anything when it comes to jargon. We used to teach reading; now we facilitate TCLP (Teaching Critical Learning Pathways) cycles.

i love Emerson but he is just as hard to read as Butler!

In order for the proposition "academic language is purposely obfuscated" to be logically proved false, all that is required is a single instance of academic writing that was not obfuscated, as the proposition is existential and therefore encompassing.

In order for the proposition "academic language is often purposely obfuscated" (nb: italics added) to be logically proved false, it would first be necessary to determine an accurate definition of "often". This is, in practise, not possible at present. For the purposes of this paper, however, we shall adopt a measurable standard for "often", so that we shall not be stymied in our research at the very outset. That standard shall be one sentence out of any set of ten sequential sentences.

Next, we encounter a particularly thorny difficulty with the word "purposely", as this speaks to motives and motives are notoriously occult. Establishing an author's purposeful obfuscation would seem to be, if such a thing were possible, even more impossible than an accurate definition of "often", for, as we have demonstrated above, it is possible to circumvent the lack of a definition for "often" by supplying one and allowing the reader to determine the validity of the definition. On the contrary, there is no such easy methodology available in the case of "purposely".

Imagine, if you will, using the simple expedient of asking the author whether a perceived obfuscation was inserted with the purpose of obscuring his/her meaning. The answer, regardless of its nature, cannot be objectively verified by any means of which we are currently aware. This presents a quandry that we have not been able to solve apart from an appeal to pure guesswork.

Research (bibliography follows) seems to indicate that obscurity of meaning is quite common in normal human discourse. Purposeful obscurity is situational, normally occuring where the speaker fears that a more direct and clear meaning will lead to negative consequences.

(to be continued)

it is a little ironic, huh? (xp)

clemenz,

tell me about your worksheets graphic organizers brain frames mind maps

there's a tradition and a dialogue into which post-structuralism slots into - it's supposed to be hard, but I think it's often rewarding as well.

jargon - I'll transpose nietzsche's insight into why jargon is necessary and even valuable

A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms—in short, a sum of human relations which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.

all language is metaphoric btw

i hate how academic language is bound up with idea of "cultural capital" (how's that for some theory). Honestly, it doesn't make you a smarter or better or more worthwhile person to have read Butler any more than understanding Heisenberg. if you dont like it, don't read it. if you are interested in certain questions and ideas that lead to that kind of writing i think you'll find yourself eventually in the company of this kind of writing. it's not for everyone nor does it need to be.

No-one else wants to mention http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair ?

lol law review articles are the worst ... i don't think i've ever had to use a law review article once since i've graduated.

goes hand in hand w/ the postmodern paper generator:
http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo/

predominant moral to take from the sokal affair is that sokal's a dick, rly.

ftr i don't think "is the language obfuscated" is a question that was ever really disagreed upon in that other thread

― BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, Wednesday, February 15, 2012 8:38 PM (37 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

what thread was this?

xps oh great the sokal hoax came up

anyway I think this thread treads close to whiney style 'why do people even READ foucault?!' territory so

::stage exit left::

oh no u didn

re HOOS, 'obfuscated' isn't really the right word though, it suggests that there's an explicit something (or an explicit nothing) being hidden under the linguistic smoke and mirrors rather than that there's something actually going on between form and content.

i'm gonna say false

i don't find that chunk of butler particularly dense or unreadable but not particularly... worthwhile for all the work either

she's simply using a lot of highly technical terms. even stuff like "totalities" that is a word we all know is still doing specific philosophical work in that passage. the sentence itself isnt the climax of an argument (that i can tell) but basically laying some ground work for what comes later. a lot of her readers know this story already.

― ryan, Wednesday, February 15, 2012 9:55 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark

yeah, this, really. if you happened upon a paper written by an engineer about fluid dynamics, or a paper by a legal scholar expounding on the activity/inactivity doctrine of the commerce clause in constitutional law, or the role of historicism in history, you wouldn't level the charge of 'purposeful obfuscation'...

the people in the zones that butler moves in are all familiar with these terms, have been socialized into the circle. there's an internal vocabulary and language at work here. I don't see why we should resent them for that.

― https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHg5SJYRHA0 (dayo), Wednesday, February 15, 2012 9:59 PM (22 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is bullshit at least in the specific case of butler

Martha Nussbaum on Judith Butler
http://www.akad.se/Nussbaum.pdf

It is difficult to come to grips with Butler's ideas, because it is difficult to figure out what they are. Butler is a very smart person. In public discussions, she proves that she can speak clearly and has a quick grasp of what is said to her. Her written style, however, is ponderous and obscure. It is dense with allusions to other theorists, drawn from a wide range of different theoretical traditions. In addition to Foucault, and to a more recent focus on Freud, Butler's work relies heavily on the thought of Louis Althusser, the French lesbian theorist Monique Wittig, the American anthropologist Gayle Rubin, Jacques Lacan, J.L. Austin, and the American philosopher of language Saul Kripke. These figures do not all agree with one another, to say the least; so an initial problem in reading Butler is that one is bewildered to find her arguments buttressed by appeal to so many contradictory concepts and doctrines, usually without any account of how the apparent contradictions will be resolved.
A further problem lies in Butler's casual mode of allusion. The ideas of these thinkers are never described in enough detail to include the uninitiated (if you are not familiar with the Althusserian concept of "interpellation," you are lost for chapters) or to explain to the initiated how, precisely, the difficult ideas are being understood. Of course, much academic writing is allusive in some way: it presupposes prior knowledge of certain doctrines and positions. But in both the continental and the Anglo-American philosophical traditions, academic writers for a specialist audience standardly acknowledge that the figures they mention are complicated, and the object of many different interpretations. They therefore typically assume the responsibility of advancing a definite interpretation among the contested ones, and of showing by argument why they have interpreted the figure as they have, and why their own interpretation is better than others.

We find none of this in Butler. Divergent interpretations are simply not
considered--even where, as in the cases of Foucault and Freud, she is advancing highly contestable interpretations that would not be accepted by many scholars. Thus one is led to the conclusion that the allusiveness of the writing cannot be explained in the usual way, by positing an audience of specialists eager to debate the details of an esoteric academic position.

The writing is simply too thin to satisfy any such audience. It is also obvious that Butler's work is not directed at a non-academic audience eager to grapple with actual injustices. Such an audience would simply be baffled by the thick soup of Butler's prose, by its air of in-group
knowingness, by its extremely high ratio of names to explanations. To whom, then, is Butler speaking? It would seem that she is addressing a group of young feminist theorists in the academy who are neither students of philosophy, caring about what Althusser and Freud and Kripke really said, nor outsiders, needing to be informed about the nature of their projects and persuaded of their worth. This implied audience is imagined as remarkably docile. Subservient to the oracular voice of Butler's text, and dazzled by its patina of high-concept abstractness, the imagined reader poses few questions, requests no arguments and no clear definitions of terms.
Still more strangely, the implied reader is expected not to care greatly about Butler's own final view on many matters. For a large proportion of the sentences in any book by Butler--especially sentences near the end of chapters--are questions. Sometimes the answer that the question expects is evident. But often things are much more indeterminate. Among the non-interrogative sentences, many begin with "Consider..." or "One could suggest..."--in such a way that Butler never quite tells the reader whether she approves of the view described. Mystification as well as hierarchy are the tools of her practice, a mystification that eludes
criticism because it makes few definite claims.

suggest reading the rest of that article, i only cp'd the part specifically about writing style but it's really good

Ugh, I once failed a student for writing a summary of a book chapter (about female blues singers of the 1920s) that was almost entirely fancy-sounding nonsense: "These committal-like tenures cut through the article as a salient explanation to their intercourse" was a typical sentence that stands out in my mind. He kept debating the mark, constantly arguing "Ah, but you can bend that definition" every time I showed him the meaning of a word in the dictionary and ultimately arguing that "any paper can be unclear".

xpost to Sokal Affair

(He was a psychology major.)

almost entirely fancy-sounding nonsense

that also failed to answer the questions asked btw

"those in the crossing must in the end know what is mistaken by all urging for intelligibility: that every thinking of being, all philosophy, can never be confirmed by 'facts,' i.e., by beings. Making itself intelligible is suicide for philosophy. Those who idolize 'facts' never notice that their idols only shine in a borrowed light. They are also meant not to notice this; for thereupon they would have to be at a loss and therefore useless. But idolizers and idols are used wherever gods are in flight and so announce their nearness."

XP to Sund4r
Haha! My brother did school essays that sounded like that, because he'd just copied something and substituted every other word with a word randomly plucked from the thesaurus entry for that word.

btw here are jb's responses to the bad-writing award

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v21/n13/letters
https://pantherfile.uwm.edu/wash/www/butler.htm

I think there can be pretty clear incentives for obfuscated language everywhere. outside of academia too. and I think the idea that the 'more complex = better' fallacy is something that invades other disciplines - like pick up a political science journal, it's all filled w/ pointless math for the sake of math, because math is good and scientific and and most importantly...*hard*. and I mean the field of economics...basically ruined forever by math.

something that's more complicated can give itself authority = there is an incentive towards complication, even when it's not actually there for a useful purpose.

Part of why I'm sometimes not sure what I'm doing anymore, or why I'm doing it:

TLCP tips...

• Identification and ownership of issues is necessary to promote open-ended dialogue and professional risk-taking.
• Systematic evaluation of the consequences of actions is necessary if TLCPs are to refine and further develop interpretations and solutions.
• Ownership by the school staff makes it more likely that TLCPs will be able to compete for priority.
• Road blocks, misunderstandings, and disappointments need to be recognized as important “moments of learning” for both individuals and teams.
• Common understanding of assessment, rubric criteria, curricular expectations and “big ideas” takes time; all present potential moments of uncertainty and learning.
• Refining, adjusting and modifying occur in all stages and should be embraced as teachers co-construct their collective understanding through the experience.

"Co-construct" is very big these days. I realize this is mild when compared to more extreme academic language, but it can get depressing. You get bombarded with this stuff on an ongoing basis, and meanwhile you're sometimes just trying to get through to some kid that it's not okay to lose a pencil every other day.

should academic writers think hard about why they are writing in a particular way? definitely. should they consider their audience? yes. and so should the reader!

i assume that Heidegger, max. That's a great passage!

yes it is! translation via wikipedia, lol

Surely, neither the LRB nor Eagleton believes that theorists should confine themselves to writing introductory primers such as those that he has chosen to provide.

http://gifsoup.com/webroot/animatedgifs/75383_o.gif

nazis: pro-obfuscation

you know honestly the trick for this stuff is to read it aloud (learned that trying milton in college)

by "this stuff" i mean ilx fyi

some of u guys may not get stoned enough

and I mean the field of economics...basically ruined forever by math.

do you really think so? i think there was definitely an initial incentive towards greater credibility that pushed mathematical economics forward, but math's usefulness in the field, especially empirically, is hard to argue against. i think the real loss in economics being so mathy is a focus away from political economics, towards more abstract models. admittedly i'm further from it but me humanities babble looks like the same thing, pushing relevant and accessible discussion aside in favour of an increasingly abstract, exclusively academic dialogue

I was going to ask how you would do economics without math.

i think the main problem unadressed by butler's response is like, wouldn't the better writer challenge common sense but still be readable?

haha flopson yeah that's what I meant I was just being dramatic , obv economics depends on a foundation of some math but the field has stagnated w/ a bunch of dudes throwing phd math at each other instead of like thinking about how the world actually works. for the same reason - you can't argue w/ complexity.

people are intimidated by it and nobody can criticize you if they don't understand you

flopson so otm in the last two posts, iatee otm, max otm. Cool thread

feel like max was saying a different thing than iatee + flopson

hmmm the only post I was referring to was the most recent

it's the most crucial to max's argument

i wasnt actually saying anything, heidegger was saying things

i think an interesting experiment prompted by this would be to read an academic article at random (or not could even be a famous one) and try to parse it googling all the terms you don't understand. i think that if dayo & ryan are right anyone should be able to come to at least some simple understanding of any article in the humanities

max authorial intent is dead

So that Butler quote does seem impenetrable to me, not that I spent great amounts of time on it. However, things like these are my bread and butter:

http://www.google.ca/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=fitsioris%20conklin&source=web&cd=3&ved=0CDYQFjAC&url=http%3A%2F%2Fcim08.web.auth.gr%2Fcim08_papers%2FFitsioris-Conklin%2FFitsioris-Conklin.pdf&ei=gH08T_itJOTx0gHbiLDBBw&usg=AFQjCNHpslICT6tVBvKzcO4hHjkD-6ovhA&cad=rja

http://www.mtosmt.org/issues/mto.09.15.5/mto.09.15.5.adams.html

http://www.mtosmt.org/issues/mto.07.13.1/mto.07.13.1.marion.html

http://www.ex-tempore.org/ExTempore00/MACHLEDE.html

I'm curious whether these seem purposely obfuscatory to someone who's not in the field.

try to parse it googling all the terms you don't understand.

googles "red wheel barrow"

i think an interesting experiment prompted by this would be to read an academic article at random (or not could even be a famous one) and try to parse it googling all the terms you don't understand. i think that if dayo & ryan are right anyone should be able to come to at least some simple understanding of any article in the humanities

― flopson, Wednesday, February 15, 2012 10:57 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i dont see why this wouldnt work, i feel like this is how i read academic papers half the time. i mean not really anymore but "back when"

the problem with butler isn't that she uses words i don't know. she doesn't, really. and yet.

i think an interesting experiment prompted by this would be to read an academic article at random (or not could even be a famous one) and try to parse it googling all the terms you don't understand. i think that if dayo & ryan are right anyone should be able to come to at least some simple understanding of any article in the humanities

anyone anyone? cuz there are a lot of perfectly understandable things many anyones couldn't understand. also wouldn't this task failing suggest that anyone who claims to understand it is actually lying or fooling themselves, rather than merely that it's a bit unnecessarily opaque?

also orwell to thread obv

not sure i get that heiddeger quote. urging philosophers to be intelligible isn't the same thing as urging them to only state 'facts.' just because you're not limited to factual statements doesn't mean the nonfactual ones you do make have to be unintelligible

I never said anything except 'there are def incentives towards the unnecessarily opaque'

Heidegger's point is that it's when things are supposedly most "clear" that things are being obfuscated.

Carnap on Heidegger to thread

“[The move] from a [[structuralist] account in which [capital] is understood to [structure] [social relations] in relatively homologous ways] to a view of [[hegemony] in which [power relations] are [subject] to [repetition], [convergence], and [rearticulation]] brought the question of [temporality] into the [thinking of structure], and marked [a shift] from a form of [Althusserian theory] that takes [structural [totalities] as theoretical [objects]] to one in which [the insights into the [contingent possibility] of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent [sites] and [strategies] of the rearticulation of power].”

i sorta tried to put in brackets all the concepts and references youd need. note that a lot of those are not words for which their is a common definition so much as words that activate certain questions, recall certain battles. this is on both a jargon level and a metaphorical level -- "subject to" repetition, structuralist "account" -- none of those words are chosen accidentally or would be the equivalent to other turns of phrase

other suggested experiment: pepsi challenge http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo/

althusserian theory

Martha Nussbaum on Judith Butler

This criticism of Butler is exceptionally clear and understandable. Because I have not read a single bit of Judith Butler's writing, I cannot say if this criticism is just or accurate. However, its clarity and specifity would allow me, were I to read Butler, to discover whether or not it describes what I am reading. Score one for non-obfuscated academic writing, as practised by Martha Nussbaum. She could be wrong, but she doesn't hide her meaning.

i used to be so into althusser

its not purposefully obfuscated, its just a culture that doesnt care abt good writing, it cares abt other things, which is why only people who care abt those things care to read it

good point

yeah jho seems p otm, there. i can't speak sensibly about academic writing in the humanities because i have a lot of feelings, but i would not be inclined to describe it as purposely obscure. i think it is just bad writing. butler, for example, in her academic work, writes badly but is also writing about real things.

i have an irritation with her because she was very annoying at a talk about the state of the discipline i attended while in graduate school. she seemed incredibly out of touch with reality in the sense of the economic pressures on universities and their effects on english departments. which i guess she can be, because she's judith butler. she should probably not talk on panels about those things.

its not purposefully obfuscated, its just a culture that doesnt care abt good writing, it cares abt other things, which is why only people who care abt those things care to read it

― lag∞n, Thursday, 16 February 2012 00:19 (52 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i know i just otm'd this but like otoh come on smart people esp influential big name ones really should write well. if they're smart enough to come up with these supposedly interesting worthwhile ideas they could probably spend another ten minutes making in intelligible. also like, is that really what's happening, that they're having niche discussions about things only they care about? i suspect they're writing about things a lot of people would or do care about, and they shouldn't make their discussion so exclusive

i think their arguments are reliant on a lot of philosophical/metaphysical underpinnings that are difficult to write about clearly. certainly some people would say that if academic writing in the humanities were less reliant on certain thinkers, it would be clearer and more valuable.

also tbf there is a lot of academic writing in the humanities that is not butleresque. even in literary criticism. not reliant/based in poststructuralism.

also i feel like people write badly because it's hard to write well

sorry, that was a little jack handey of me

yah if u have to write to build yr academic career and academia doesnt value good writing youre prob just going to not bother w/that extra degree of difficulty

which is not to say their arent good writers in academia obvs or that there aren't benefits to writing well, just that it's not required

btw never apologize for being jack handy

I do marketing communications for humanities and social sciences at a very good uk university. Fun fun fun when dealing with research.

People can also use lots of mathy jargon to hide the fact that they're actually doing very simple or straightforward things. I'm still sort of fuming at like two pages I waded through with a derivation of a bunch of things invoking Euler's theorem on homogenous equations and soforth only to realize "wait, all this says is that if we assume every function is linear then we can decompose things linearly." But they couldn't have just said that because that's sort of embarrassing and not so much a "result" or "novel method" as much as mathematical common sense, and also because it immediately reveals the huge flaws in such an approach.

So yeah, anywhere where there's some social incentive to impress people and some opportunity in the form of a significant genuine technical/jargon/expertise barrier, then you're going to get, even from good people who do good work and say good things, an impulse to, at least occasionally "cheat" and just substitute some razzle-dazzle to paper over certain unpleasant gaps in their work.

I just read a very good guide to clear mathematical writing (by knuth!) by the way, and it made the point that even specialists will tend to appreciate and prefer a more jargon-free and accessible presentation. Certain classic papers and articles (and I think this holds true across most disciplines) are a real pleasure to read and people tend to associate a command of the subject with a certain clarity of presentation. Other classic articles are known for holding important and dense ideas, and especially ideas not yet fully worked out, pointing towards possible solutions to difficult problems, or perhaps even presenting solutions, but solutions in their raw and unworked initial patchwork life, not solutions as refined and transformed in light of future generalizations. Those articles are known as important or foundational, too. But (almost) nobody likes to read them.

if dense self-reflexive prose isn't a pleasure to read then fu imo

nussbaum says some v contentious things in that piece. her partic brand of clarity reads as a sort of certainty where often there can be none. it seems to obfuscate the inherently openness of what she is talking about, sharpening it into an unrecognisable image of itself. the argument is often evasive but it struts around, seeming sure of itself. it seems its tactics are not dissimilar from those it seeks to condemn.

i would be interested in reading judith butler on the subject of martha nussbaum's oriental rug collection

"those in the crossing must in the end know what is mistaken by all urging for intelligibility: that every thinking of being, all philosophy, can never be confirmed by 'facts,' i.e., by beings. Making itself intelligible is suicide for philosophy. Those who idolize 'facts' never notice that their idols only shine in a borrowed light. They are also meant not to notice this; for thereupon they would have to be at a loss and therefore useless. But idolizers and idols are used wherever gods are in flight and so announce their nearness."

― max, Wednesday, February 15, 2012 7:33 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

that is straight nonsense, max, a hollow defense of obfuscation that is itself willfully obscure. the more "difficult" aspects may be an artifact of the translation, i dunno, but the idea that it would be "suicide" for philosophy to permit intelligibility is completely ridiculous on the face of it, whether or not philosophy is dependent on "'facts,' i.e., beings". though it's almost impossible to parse completely, heidegger's argument seems to be something like this:

"philosophy can never be confirmed by facts. therefore (1), intelligibility is suicide for philosophy. those who idolize "facts" do not notice that their idols have no intrinsic authority and, instead, gain whatever authority they might seem to possess from human belief. the idolizers are not meant to notice this (2) because if they did, their own authority would be lost. idolizers and idols are used when gods are in flight, and so announce their nearness (3).

(1) the dependent nature of this claim is not made clear in the original text, but i have to assume that it's implied, as it would otherwise be a complete non-sequitur. unfortunately, it's still a functional non-sequitur, as it remains completely unsupported. nothing else in the passage gives us clear reason to believe that "intelligibility" might be "suicide for philosophy".

(2) "meant" by whom? there's no way to know, as text does not address this.

(3) okay, wtf is "gods are in flight" supposed to mean in this context? who or what are the "gods" in question and what are the means and meaning of their "flight"? is heidegger simply restating his earlier assertion that authority is being conjured by human belief? is he suggesting that a certain sacredness is being invoked? he seems to be attempting to pull some kind of philosophical "gotcha!" on those who put stock in facts and factuality by suddenly treating his previous "idlolizers"/"idols" metaphor as though it were a literally and precisely accurate way of describing their beliefs. but it's not. it's just a metaphor, one with a great deal of inbuilt imprecision. no one "idolizes" facts in a truly religious sense.

the worst part is that heidegger never makes clear how all his talk about facts, idols and their idolizers, borrowed light, and gods in flight actually supports his central thesis: the "suicidal" nature of philosophical intelligibility. is he simply saying that philosophy cannot be proved by facts, and therefore philosophers must hide this fact (lol) from those who place stock in such things? or is he perhaps saying that there's some corollary (but unstated) idol/idolizer relationship that gives philosophical un-intelligibility its own authority, and that just as believers in facts must not question the source from which facts derive their authority, philosophers must not question this?

this is the worst sort of obscurantist gibberish. i suppose it's appropriate that it's presented as a defense of incomprehensibility, but it doesn't even make its own case satisfactorily.

Here's the Judith Butler glob iatee posted in the other thread:

“The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.”

Apparently this is award-worthy obfuscation. Is there no way to further parse this sentence to the author's satisfaction; or, is it the point to make the reader re-read the sentence a dozen times in order to even start to grasp even what is going on there; or, is it perfectly clear what this means to everybody but me :/

― sleepingbag, Wednesday, February 15, 2012 6:52 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

this is nowhere near as bad as the heidegger quote, but it's another example of a very simple idea being presented as incredibly complex for no good reason. what butler's saying here is basically just common sense:

structuralist accounts tended to assume that capital structures social relations in a fixed way. these were replaced by a view that takes time into account, acknowledging that hegemonic structures must be continually reasserted and are thus subject to change. this shift represents a move away from a view ("Althussarian") that treats structural wholes as fixed objects, to one that emphasizes the ways in which structured power relations change and assert themselves over time.

i included that last sentence there because i was trying to duplicate not just the meaning but also the general structure of butler's argument, but you'll notice that it's entirely redundant. it's just a slightly more elaborate restatement of what was already said in the first two sentences. And Butler does all this in a single sentence! She puts forth a simple idea, but makes it seem complicated by employing jargon and redundancy, and by failing to break the argument into digestible chunks. Then, without even ending the sentence, she repeats the whole damn thing. It's just ridiculous. She's intentionally presenting a simple and useful observation as a bewilderingly complex intellectual thicket.

you know who else repeats the whole damn thing?

i mean, flopson and iatee (et al) OTM. there is a culture of deliberate obscurantism and obfuscation that seems to flourish in philosophy and literature departments. it's not a product of post-structuralism, so far as i can tell. this culture been an intrinsic part of philosophy as an academic discipline for a great deal longer than that. it justifies itself in many ways (as technical specificity, as a product of intellectual complexity and/or "informed" engagement, as a critical or even a political device), but it seems mostly to be a product of competition, narcissism and defensiveness within academic circles. it's a tool by which writers and thinkers assert their own intellectual significance, a lure to those who pride themselves on their ability to comprehend the supposedly "incomprehensible", and a defense against criticism.

you know who else repeats the whole damn thing?

― dayove cool (Noodle Vague), Thursday, February 16, 2012 2:38 AM (7 minutes ago) Bookmark

lol, well, perhaps i do. i'm just posting on a message board, though - thinking aloud, mostly. i could probably stand to go back and edit a bit before i hit submit, but i'm honestly trying to be as clear, simple and direct as i can.

xp oh man you took out "re-articulation" and "possibilities", I thought that was the point of the sentence?

think a lot of this obscureness is a kind of caginess / self-protection. unless the language is watertight ( and it's clear that it contains the academic backstory) then the writer risks opening themselves up to easy criticism... which might invalidate whatever point they're trying to make.

xp

i don't know man, you've made your point umpteen times, and it's your opinion, and ok. but i don't see you really engaging with counter-arguments much more than "no you're wrong" and then repeating the point. and the repetition itself becomes a wearying debating tactic, like if you hammer away at it enough i'm gonna realise deleuze and guattari are frauds and go home and throw my books in the bin?

argue away by all means but i thought rather than just snark it out - my instinct because i find this inflexibility pretty frustrating - i wd be honest about this. i feel like by insisting on "clarity" and "meaning" and ideas that exist outside of discourse that you're simply not addressing the issues that are central to the thinkers you're disparaging.

i totally see why you'd say that NV, but i hadn't participated in this thread prior to those last few posts. i think you're responding to stuff i said in the feminism thread. and yeah, i did intentionally repeat those arguments here, but only cuz i was treating this as a new discussion.

i feel like by insisting on "clarity" and "meaning" and ideas that exist outside of discourse that you're simply not addressing the issues that are central to the thinkers you're disparaging.

i sort of agree, but only because i have to. i mean, you're right: "clarity" and "meaning" are not absolute and do not exist outside the discourse. i understand that the writers in question may not have the same relation to or understanding of these things that i do. but relative to the examples presented so far, this argument strikes me as self-serving sophistry. (no offense, NV, i'm talking about their "sophistry", not yours.) i don's see any evidence that profoundly different approaches to clarity or meaning are in play. i do not see anything that's being effectively said about language, power or the construction of meaning that couldn't be better said in 10-20 "clearly arranged" words. i see nothing radical, nothing transformative, nothing useful in the "obscurantism and obfuscation" i'm deriding.

relative to writers like barthes, i do see a kind of literary virtue in bewildering complexity: the joy in decoding dense, complex and beautifully written language. "the pleasure of the text." but writers like barthes are extremely rare, and their influence on much less interesting thinkers and stylists seems to have been tragic.

/"those in the crossing must in the end know what is mistaken by all urging for intelligibility: that every thinking of being, all philosophy, can never be confirmed by 'facts,' i.e., by beings. Making itself intelligible is suicide for philosophy. Those who idolize 'facts' never notice that their idols only shine in a borrowed light. They are also meant not to notice this; for thereupon they would have to be at a loss and therefore useless. But idolizers and idols are used wherever gods are in flight and so announce their nearness."

― max, Wednesday, February 15, 2012 7:33 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark/

that is straight nonsense, max, a hollow defense of obfuscation that is itself willfully obscure. the more "difficult" aspects may be an artifact of the translation, i dunno, but the idea that it would be "suicide" for philosophy to permit intelligibility is completely ridiculous on the face of it, whether or not philosophy is dependent on "'facts,' i.e., beings". though it's almost impossible to parse completely, heidegger's argument seems to be something like this:

/"philosophy can never be confirmed by facts. therefore (1), intelligibility is suicide for philosophy. those who idolize "facts" do not notice that their idols have no intrinsic authority and, instead, gain whatever authority they might seem to possess from human belief. the idolizers are not meant to notice this (2) because if they did, their own authority would be lost. idolizers and idols are used when gods are in flight, and so announce their nearness (3)./

(1) the dependent nature of this claim is not made clear in the original text, but i have to assume that it's implied, as it would otherwise be a complete non-sequitur. unfortunately, it's still a functional non-sequitur, as it remains completely unsupported. nothing else in the passage gives us clear reason to believe that "intelligibility" might be "suicide for philosophy".

(2) "meant" by whom? there's no way to know, as text does not address this.

(3) okay, wtf is "gods are in flight" supposed to mean in this context? who or what are the "gods" in question and what are the means and meaning of their "flight"? is heidegger simply restating his earlier assertion that authority is being conjured by human belief? is he suggesting that a certain sacredness is being invoked? he seems to be /attempting/ to pull some kind of philosophical "gotcha!" on those who put stock in facts and factuality by suddenly treating his previous "idlolizers"/"idols" metaphor as though it were a literally and precisely accurate way of describing their beliefs. but it's not. it's just a metaphor, one with a great deal of inbuilt imprecision. no one "idolizes" facts in a truly religious sense.

the worst part is that heidegger never makes clear how all his talk about facts, idols and their idolizers, borrowed light, and gods in flight actually supports his central thesis: the "suicidal" nature of philosophical intelligibility. is he simply saying that philosophy cannot be proved by facts, and therefore philosophers must hide this fact (lol) from those who place stock in such things? or is he perhaps saying that there's some corollary (but unstated) idol/idolizer relationship that gives philosophical un-intelligibility its own authority, and that just as believers in facts must not question the source from which facts derive their authority, philosophers must not question this?

this is the worst sort of obscurantist gibberish. i suppose it's appropriate that it's presented as a defense of incomprehensibility, but it doesn't even make its own case satisfactorily.

Lmao

oops, mistook your "and ideas that exist outside of discourse" for "AS ideas that exist outside of discourse". makes my response a bit nonsensical. it's true that i'm not responding to the writers ideas so much as how they're communicated, but that's one of the unstated framing questions for this entire thread: "is the method of an idea's communication important, and if so, how?"

my position is that the method of communication is extremely important, and to the extent that the primary intent of writing IS the clear communication of information, then writing should avoid obfuscation at all costs.

if the primary intent of writing is NOT the communication of information, then the game changes. if the writing in question is instead a kind of formally focused artwork, experiment, or political act, then it should obviously be judged by different criteria. perhaps i'm ignoring this. but i think that most of the writing in question presents itself primarily as the communication of ideas, and that the artistic, experimental and political implications of its formal construction have little value.

that last to noodle...

not sure i get that heiddeger quote. urging philosophers to be intelligible isn't the same thing as urging them to only state 'facts.' just because you're not limited to factual statements doesn't mean the nonfactual ones you do make have to be unintelligible

― flopson, Wednesday, February 15, 2012 11:04 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

my problem with this is that soon 'intelligible' becomes code for 'things that I don't understand.' it's like a yelper who says 'the food here wasn't good' well what is good food 'food that I think is good!'

that is literally the worst exegesis on heidigger, perhaps on any philosopher, that I have ever read btw

Lmao

― max, Thursday, February 16, 2012 3:27 AM (13 minutes ago) Bookmark

care to expand on that, max?

it isn't the "communication" of ideas - taking idea x out of the ether, carrying it to you the reader in a crystal prose vessel and unloading it into your brain at a conceptual level at the other end - because this model of ideas and communication is itself under challenge. the vessel is the idea, no idea exists outside of the vessel.

actually derrida iirc says it's more complicated than this otherwise translation wd be impossible, but also maybe all reading and writing is translation in a mathematical sense, always.

that is literally the worst exegesis on heidigger, perhaps on any philosopher, that I have ever read btw

― https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHg5SJYRHA0 (dayo), Thursday, February 16, 2012 3:43 AM (33 seconds ago) Bookmark

how so?

con tenderizer I fell like u shd stop trying to extract specific and translatable meaning out of everything u read & just vibe w sentences instead

it isn't the "communication" of ideas - taking idea x out of the ether, carrying it to you the reader in a crystal prose vessel and unloading it into your brain at a conceptual level at the other end - because this model of ideas and communication is itself under challenge. the vessel is the idea, no idea exists outside of the vessel.

i get that. but "i have a car" is nonetheless a clearer statement than "Xsldkhtosedlkrhfdsdh" in the present context. the fact that one is interrogating the structure of language does not mean that one's use of language suddenly becomes beyond criticism. quite the opposite, i'd think. even if that criticism doesn't respond to the arguments contained in the text.

well for one thing, you're pretending that that excerpt is a freestanding piece of text in itself, and then taking it to town for not having justified its propositions in the 3 sentences that you're 'analyzing.' ??? 'hey there's no support for this in the text' well why don't you go read the original text in full

gonna cite to this top 10 dn classic:

contl;drizer (J0rdan S.), Saturday, 15 May 2010 02:46 (1 year ago)

con tenderizer I fell like u shd stop trying to extract specific and translatable meaning out of everything u read & just vibe w sentences instead

― max, Thursday, February 16, 2012 3:47 AM (53 seconds ago) Bookmark

chill noize dude translator not helping

well for one thing, you're pretending that that excerpt is a freestanding piece of text in itself, and then taking it to town for not having justified its propositions in the 3 sentences that you're 'analyzing.' ??? 'hey there's no support for this in the text' well why don't you go read the original text in full

― https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHg5SJYRHA0 (dayo), Thursday, February 16, 2012 3:49 AM (1 minute ago) Bookmark

the heidegger quote was offered as an example of something in a thread dedicated to the construction of academic language. so i attempted to decode it, in the spirit of the thread. i understood in saying that "there's no way to know, as the text does not address this" that a longer extract might make this more clear, but i was limiting myself to the example at hand.

i don't know why the rickrolled video keeps popping up but it seems appropriate

the fact that one is interrogating the structure of language does not mean that one's use of language suddenly becomes beyond criticism

you can't interrogate "language" - most of the philosophers we're discussing here aren't doing that most of the time, if you want a broad simple category i guess they are interrogating "thought" - from outside of language. there isn't a stable high ground from which you can look down and survey the structures below. the interrogation of thought has to take place within the material of thought, and therefore can only refer to more thought.

good job at upending heidigger on a message board

(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻ɹǝbbıpıǝɥ┻)

let me know if you need my input on this. email is in my profile.

caek wd u say u vibe w astrophysics

you can't interrogate "language" - most of the philosophers we're discussing here aren't doing that most of the time, if you want a broad simple category i guess they are interrogating "thought" - from outside of language. there isn't a stable high ground from which you can look down and survey the structures below. the interrogation of thought has to take place within the material of thought, and therefore can only refer to more thought.

― dayove cool (Noodle Vague), Thursday, February 16, 2012 3:54 AM (39 seconds ago) Bookmark

sure, but since you mentioned derrida, i thought it was appropriate to speak of "language" instead of clarifying the fact that i meant "the way the structures of communication encode other types of structures". get the rest.

good job at upending heidigger on a message board

― lolinternets (dayo), Thursday, February 16, 2012 3:54 AM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark

i'm just saying what i think about a chunk of text. why does it have to be any more or less than that?

'that's just like, my opinion man'

ok this is annoying now, stop

criticizing heidegger is no different than criticizing george bush or david bowie. some things we like and/or find value in, other things, not so much. the supposed importance of the things in question shouldn't concern us in the least.

think a lot of this obscureness is a kind of caginess / self-protection. unless the language is watertight ( and it's clear that it contains the academic backstory) then the writer risks opening themselves up to easy criticism.

otm for academic language - theory-word density is only one symptom; I run into the other version of humanities bad writing more - everything is 'interesting' or 'complex', lots of hedging whenever a connection between things is suggested, nervous about judgements, maybe lightly theorised - 'discourse'. Sort of marshy to get through even if there's good info in there. Maybe a result of overcrowded, competitive disciplines with massive secondary literatures.

Don't really have anything to add here, but think the number of exceptions you have to make to a 'clarity of communication' edict render it near-worthless - trade talk is ok within a trade, sometimes your rhetoric has to try and break things, theory/philosophy has been using complicated literary surfaces for a long time. I mean I'm not really a theory type, but Deleuze is a fucking A1 trip, & it's density & energy & imagination that's doing it, not style guide clarity.

hope the action poll fires back up soon, maybe commando will place again.

there is some pretty awful writing in astrophysics, but most of that is due to the understandable difficulties of non-native english speakers.

there is plenty of rubbish like gbx took down on the other thread though.

i can think of 2 astronomers whose prose style in research articles i actually vibe to. this guy: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1202.3403v1.pdf (who has an advantage because he writes about theory) and this guy: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1009.3015v1.pdf (who mixes impolitic hardman precision and a conversational tone in a way i find v amusing)

fwiw all the good astro writers i can think of either have a US liberal arts background or remind me of kingsley amis.

here's the first guy writing about something other than equations http://ukads.nottingham.ac.uk/abs/2004IAUS..220....3B (click the PDF link at the top)

I really like the tone of the second guy and the way he's continually bringing the focus back to the wider picture makes me almost think for a minute I understand what he's saying! is he well thought-of in the field?

A lot of Bill Bryson's science book is him tearing his hair out about the pattern of "dude discovers something - dude can't write for shit, his mumblings get published in the parish newsletter - someone else 30 years later discovers it and can write and it's named after them - first dude's grandchildren go through his papers after he dies and realise what's gone on"

he's an extremely influential guy in my field, yes. some people find him a little blunt, which i think comes through in the writing (in a way i myself like).

the conflation of the blunt and the baroquely intellectual is maybe my favorite look in a writer, cf mencken, flann o'brien, jonathan meades (the fact that i disagree with all of them about substantial parts of their thought is perhaps cause for further reflection on my part)

speaking of mencken:

"Any man who afflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see them misunderstood."

yeah that second guy is great!

not sure i get that heiddeger quote. urging philosophers to be intelligible isn't the same thing as urging them to only state 'facts.' just because you're not limited to factual statements doesn't mean the nonfactual ones you do make have to be unintelligible

― flopson, Wednesday, February 15, 2012 11:04 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

my problem with this is that soon 'intelligible' becomes code for 'things that I don't understand.' it's like a yelper who says 'the food here wasn't good' well what is good food 'food that I think is good!'

― https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHg5SJYRHA0 (dayo), Thursday, 16 February 2012 06:42 (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

that is literally the worst exegesis on heidigger, perhaps on any philosopher, that I have ever read btw

― https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHg5SJYRHA0 (dayo), Thursday, 16 February 2012 06:43 (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

you're right dayo, your analogy about how some people say they like food but really that just means they think food is good really openned my eyes about this heiddeger quote, thats definitely a much better exegesis of this text

sorry I posted that stupid quote in the first place

nussbaum says some v contentious things in that piece. her partic brand of clarity reads as a sort of certainty where often there can be none. it seems to obfuscate the inherently openness of what she is talking about, sharpening it into an unrecognisable image of itself. the argument is often evasive but it struts around, seeming sure of itself. it seems its tactics are not dissimilar from those it seeks to condemn.

― judith, Thursday, 16 February 2012 04:03 (5 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i'd be interested to know more about your take on this. what are the contentious points? also, did you read the last half?

fwiw that medical thing I posted was selected completely at random, and is not meant to be representative of truly horrible science writing

like I said in the other thread, the existence of bad writing in other fields doesn't get the humanities off the hook

otmfm

Humanities really have the most to answer for. In the sense that they are directly engaged with the act of communication, issues of translation, analysis, and application of hard data to 'soft' human squishy stuff, clear writing is more their domaine - and the lack thereof less excusable – than in hard sciences.

fwiw that medical thing I posted was selected completely at random, and is not meant to be representative of truly horrible science writing

― i love pinfold cricket (gbx), Thursday, 16 February 2012 14:37 (39 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah, but that constant drip drip of turgid and unnecessarily crufty/obscure prose is a major downer

I couldn't make heads nor tails of the medical thing when I tried to read it on Zing, but reading it on a computer where I was able to have the whole thing on the screen at once made a HUGE difference in my ability to figure out what was going on (aside from the compound names obv).

So, my solution to demystifying academic writing is to shrink the type so that more of the text can fit on one page. QED!

Full disclosure: DJP has started selling reading glasses on the side

fwiw my "foundations of semiotics" class (which in the very first class the professor said was "a joke" since semiotics is "by its very nature non-foundational") required each paper we wrote to be one page, maximum. it was the only class i ever took where everyone was REDUCING their font sizes.

I think all technical language can feel willfully sesquipedalian to the non-initiated and I also think that such writers often fall too much in love w/their subject's jargon.

1) i dont know what anyone hopes to accomplish by taking tiny bits of texts out of their totally enormous context and then demonstrating their supposed incomprehensibility.

2) it's truly obnoxious that people feel like they can wade into something that I, and other people on this thread, do and pronounce upon it with some sense of authority as if they've, say, spent any time at all trying to read Heidegger (or whoever). He's not writing a goddamn manifesto for mass consumption. You don't have to read and like Heidegger (again, just an example) but if you don't im not gonna take anything you say about him seriously.

3) said this umpteen times: the desire for clear and precise language/communication is something being interrogated in these texts. in fact, most of them find it impossible, and thus clearness is suspect as best.

4) academia does, im sure, incentivize complexity. sometimes bad writing happens. but also it's important to realize complexity is something that HAPPENS to discourses as they evolve. as I pointed out elsewhere, medieval theology is an example of a discourse of comparable complexity (if not moreso) that took place largely outside of the modern academic "publish or perish" context.

this is a really good thread, i thought i would have more to say but i think everything i would say has been covered on both sides, carry on ppl

oh what wz the other thread this spun off from btw

5) also tired of the notion that these hugely popular writers (relatively speaking) are somehow popular due to the mass delusions and insecurities of graduate students.

3) said this umpteen times: the desire for clear and precise language/communication is something being interrogated in these texts. in fact, most of them find it impossible, and thus clearness is suspect as best.

ehhhhhhh

not buying it

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complexity and complex language are not equivalent

in social system that is comprised of language they are.

i don't know what that means

When you're a kid and you don't understand big words in something you're reading, that doesn't mean the writing isn't clear. Similarly, w/in a discipline, idioms and expressions that look obscure to the layperson may carry easy meaning to the initiated.

oh what wz the other thread this spun off from btw

― desperado, rough rider (thomp),

feminists &c

Similarly, w/in a discipline, idioms and expressions that look obscure to the layperson may carry easy meaning to the initiated.

i think the issue isn't just big words or unfamiliar terms - i recall conscientiously trying to read theory with a dictionary by my side years ago - it's jargony terms, or words that connote something very different to their usual meaning, or with nuances that will go over the head of someone not steeped in the subject. plus, as per the example here, horrible horrible sentence structure full of clauses and sub-clauses that stack up on top of each other endlessly. these are all things that can be remedied without simplifying ideas.

i don't think anyone's arguing that *all* academics write like this, either

theory/philosophy = language. it used to be everyone thought they were comprised of "ideas" but then the "linguistic turn" happened and the relationship between ideas and language was overturned. language isn't really considered to "express" an idea that is fully formed in the mind before hand, it can in fact determine ideas, what counts as an idea, what counts as meaningful etc. Emerson called language a "prison house" and you could see theory/philosophy as engaged with push at its boundaries in much the same way Art pushes at the intelligible (within it's field) in order to break out into new domains of what kinds of "meaning" are possible.

geez sorry for poor typing again.

it always seemed odd to me as an undergrad that i had no problems comprehending C17th philosophers but many C20th ones may as well have been gibberish for all i got out of them

To be fair, much 20th Cent philosophy has turned precisely to language itself

Lex i'd be willing to argue part of the reason for that is that philosophy has given up on the Platonic "top-down" organization of knowledge, with philosophy at the top. so, again, there's no need to particularly care or read about this stuff unless it's the kind of thing you care about. i encourage people to care about it, but it's not like necessary for a meaningful life.

prob also a bit to do with the fact that i actively studied (and was actively taught) rousseau, descartes and so on, whereas i tried to plunge into derrida, deleuze and foucault all on my own and got precisely nowhere.

barthes was cool though, i remember that! beautifully written.

this thread has kind of made me want to give it another go, it's been years since i last tried to delve into philosophy (indeed the deleuze experience is probably the reason for that tbh)

and let me back up a few steps: I'm not familiar enough with Butler to say, but yeah Heidegger wrote like shit sometimes. not always. i kinda like how he uses words we all know and infuses them with an odd kind of portentousness. he's a mystic, in his way.

I do think something else is on the horizon, in terms of what this kind of writing will look like in the future. (namely, it's gonna look like Niklas Luhmann, so don't get your hopes up on the clarity front.)

ha lex also the entire edifice of western education and knowledge rests on the rationalism espoused by the enlightenment it's not surprising that guys writing back then make pretty good sense to us now

butler can do one though, enough feminist thinkers out there who can actually communicate clearly - i think someone like butler is more offensive to me b/c the practicalities of feminism are so essential to it - your effect on the world at large is crucial. if the world at large can't understand your ideas what is the point?

or, what nussbaum said

im a very big believe in starting with "introduction to..." texts and even the big "history of philosophy/structuralism/20th century french thought" kind of books. i even think more academics should step back and read/talk about that stuff because having the big picture in mind helps clarify what's going on in the smaller interventions of books and essays.

im a very big believe in starting with "introduction to..." texts and even the big "history of philosophy/structuralism/20th century french thought" kind of books

do you have any particular recommendations?

i am so setting myself up for a fall here but nm

nobody's addressing the bigger issue tho - ryan et al do you really believe there aren't environments that can, in theory, give people incentives for being inscrutable?

i think the point made earlier about academic writers aiming for precision rather than clarity rung true - that's what those pile-up sentences are all about, trying to make an idea watertight and shutting off loopholes

and they're not naturally adept enough with language to be able to edit it into comprehensibility at the same time, and yeah in an environment where there's no impetus to do that anyway

The stupid thing is that editing into shorter sentences would often help with clarity; oftentimes the biggest problem I have with reading academic writing is that the ideas are conveyed in so many overlapping/nested clauses that I half suspect the authors learned to write from studying German syntax.

lex: that depends on what you're interested in! judging by your above posts id say id be just as interested in anything someone might suggest for you because im not well read in those areas.

DJP is right too. It happens to your sentences when you try to write about this stuff. You start to pile on clauses.

You start to pile on clauses.

As I constantly try to remind myself, edit!

I do wish academics would spend more time honing their writing, but to address the "incentivize" question: i think if anything academics are in an environment that prizes novelty (originality) and being prolific. you'd be surprised how fast they are expected to churn out books and articles. that more than anything could be the source of the "problem," such as it is.

http://img.gamesbox.com/games/images/pilupsanta.jpg

*APPLAUSE*

'Journalistic' used to be the term of abuse I'd hear in the literary academy for stuff that (from an academic perspective) struck the wrong balance between acknowledging complexity and using clarity and/or liveliness to engage the reader.

the fact that they prize novelty just adds another incentive to craft 'difficult' writing tho

do you have any particular recommendations?

i am so setting myself up for a fall here but nm

― first period don't give a fuck, second period gon get cut (lex pretend), Thursday, February 16, 2012 11:31 AM (15 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

continuum press has a great big "book of 20th-c philosophy" that i highly recommend... its green. let me see if i can find it

this is one of the most condescending things i've read one academic say about another in a long time (from nussbaum on butler, above):

It is difficult to come to grips with Butler's ideas, because it is difficult to figure out what they are. Butler is a very smart person. In public discussions, she proves that she can speak clearly and has a quick grasp of what is said to her.

just like a capable young student! or a foreigner! no cognitive defects here! a real sharp young lady.

it's condescending to have the opinion that she can articulate her ideas clearly when speaking but not when writing?

yeah i don't...feel comfortable with that nussbaum dismissal. also nussbaum writes more clearly than butler, but her recent work has been pretty whatever.

ryan et al do you really believe there aren't environments that can, in theory, give people incentives for being inscrutable?

Not at all -- surely such an environment is theoretically possible. I can't say that I can think of a real-world environment I'd describe that way, though. It may be that in certain precincts of the financial industry there's an incentive to construct instruments whose actual nature is difficult or impossible to figure out from the legally mandated description.

actually, wait, i am not talking about her From Disgust to Humanity book, which i didn't know about

If novelty is prized above clarity...

http://www.continuumbooks.com/books/detail.aspx?BookId=116963

^^ this is the book i was talking about. looks like its out of print but you can pick up used copies for not too much. dunno why its only showing hardcover, i have a softcover version. anyway its arranged as an encyclopedia, like 50-60 entries for thinkers, thoughts, concepts, schools, etc. all of them like 5-10 pages. high readable, perfect for reference, or just dipping in and out. full disclosure: my thesis advisor wrote a bunch of the entries.

this is one of the most condescending things i've read one academic say about another in a long time

it's what makes that piece so amazing! she goes in.

if nussbaum wanted to say that, djp, she could have. she chose a wording which back-handedly suggests that butler is on the bubble as to whether or not she's sharp enough to get a cashier's job at burger king. 'a quick grasp of what is said to her'?? cmon.

given some of nussbaum's prose (i know someone who once called it 'waterlogged' and that seems dead-on) i don't think she's really in the best position to go around sneering about the writing of others.

speaking from my own position (young academic trying to get a foothold) i am pretty insistent on revising and editing my own body of work to be as clear as possible. because of my vulnerable position im trying to reach as wide an audience as possible without losing the precision of my argument. this is actually something i've struggled with a lot.

Butler, say, is in the position of not giving any fucks about that stuff. she has a tremendous amount of freedom and license (that she has definitely earned).

given some of nussbaum's prose (i know someone who once called it 'waterlogged' and that seems dead-on) i don't think she's really in the best position to go around sneering about the writing of others.

― j., Thursday, February 16, 2012 12:07 PM (28 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah, this is pretty much what i mean. it's become kind of boilerplate-y.

idk the full scope of this cos i don't read this stuff, but i did read in one of the glosses/obits of derrida's death that the style of his writing isn't 'against' clarity or ease of transmission, but is attempting to circle around the same concepts in several different ways at once. the writing isn't building from a to b to c, but is more meditative, circular, poetic even. there is a performative aspect to it, at the 'expense' of the demonstrative, if that makes sense.

this seems like a slightly different issue than 'the writing is dense because the subject matter is dense'

Just out of curiousity, what's the next sentence after that "can speak clearly" one?

Not at all -- surely such an environment is theoretically possible. I can't say that I can think of a real-world environment I'd describe that way, though. It may be that in certain precincts of the financial industry there's an incentive to construct instruments whose actual nature is difficult or impossible to figure out from the legally mandated description.

finance: http://www.interfluidity.com/v2/2669.html
business
academia
dating
politics

Ah - got it: "Her written style, however, is ponderous and obscure. It is dense with allusions to other theorists, drawn from a wide range of different theoretical traditions"

she has a tremendous amount of freedom and license (that she has definitely earned).

( •_•) i would say both

( •_•)>⌐■-■ of these clauses should be

(⌐■_■) interrogated

if nussbaum wanted to say that, djp, she could have. she chose a wording which back-handedly suggests that butler is on the bubble as to whether or not she's sharp enough to get a cashier's job at burger king. 'a quick grasp of what is said to her'?? cmon.

I am sure the context in which that excerpt comes from lends a lot more vitriol to that excerpt but, reading it her out of context, it scans like you are piling baggage onto it and then yelling at Nussbaum for it. I mean, the excerpt says "Butler is smart; she understands people quickly and can impart her ideas to others when she speaks to them"; it seems obvious to me that Nussbaum is setting this up as Butler being more than smart enough to make the choice make the deliberate, alienating choice to apparently write as impenetrably as she can.

xp: Okay in light of the sentence that immediately follows, your objection really comes across to me as isolating context so that you have something to be mad about.

also xp: lol goole

idk the full scope of this cos i don't read this stuff, but i did read in one of the glosses/obits of derrida's death that the style of his writing isn't 'against' clarity or ease of transmission, but is attempting to circle around the same concepts in several different ways at once. the writing isn't building from a to b to c, but is more meditative, circular, poetic even. there is a performative aspect to it, at the 'expense' of the demonstrative, if that makes sense.

this seems like a slightly different issue than 'the writing is dense because the subject matter is dense'

― Critique of Pure Moods (goole), Thursday, February 16, 2012 12:08 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i think both or all of these things are at play? in derrida certainly. not everyone is quite as 'playful' as derrida, or as good a writer. the circularity thing -- he tends to start and end his pieces with the same image or riff -- is oft-imitated but there arent as many ppl as smart as JD imo. but derrida is also dense, packed w/ allusion, meaning, reference. i guess maybe that makes it doubly hard.

yeah i think derrida is kind of a special case. i am not a huge fan, but he is a great writer.

was

the shift back in that sentence to talking about style just discreetly passes by the fact that the wording of the previous sentence made it do more than talk about butler's verbal style. it's a question of the use and abuse of rhetoric, which is surely relevant. i'm sure butler or someone like her could do a lot with the implicit yoking of clarity to intellectual capacity (in fact that's pretty much one of the main themes of the adorno passages she likes to cite when defending herself against criticisms like this one).

http://www.continuumbooks.com/books/detail.aspx?BookId=116963

^^ this is the book i was talking about. looks like its out of print but you can pick up used copies for not too much. dunno why its only showing hardcover, i have a softcover version. anyway its arranged as an encyclopedia, like 50-60 entries for thinkers, thoughts, concepts, schools, etc. all of them like 5-10 pages. high readable, perfect for reference, or just dipping in and out. full disclosure: my thesis advisor wrote a bunch of the entries.

― max, Thursday, February 16, 2012 12:03 PM (11 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

ok i am picking this up on amazon today

generally speaking i have almost always had good experiences w/ continuum's secondary "guides" & "companions" & so forth.

JD is a good example of someone fully in command of his writing.

iatee-- i do think you are making an interesting point. especially in terms of Plato's "esoteric" philosophy and things like that. there does seem to be certain barriers set up designed to impede the novice or layman, to prevent easy understanding and "hide" the true meaning.

The "watertight" and "shutting off loopholes" issue is very real, I think. But there's a cultural issue there too -- it has to do with, in certain arenas, people not willing to read one another generously. If you're extremely paranoid about all the possible ways somebody would want to misread you in order to attack not what you're actually saying, but you personally (possibly for no other reason than egotism) then you're going to tend to drown what you're saying in lots of qualifiers and conditionals.

On the other hand, that should also maybe be a clue that what you're trying to do is too ambitious and general to begin with, and maybe instead of making vast statements which you then slaughter with a thousand qualifiers, you should directly make the more modest statements which are left once you've slashed away all the possible wrong imputations. But that's sometimes pretty hard, I'll grant.

If you're extremely paranoid about all the possible ways somebody would want to misread you in order to attack not what you're actually saying, but you personally (possibly for no other reason than egotism) then you're going to tend to drown what you're saying in lots of qualifiers and conditionals.

lol this is probably the most otm thing said itt about the humanities academy

the shift back in that sentence to talking about style just discreetly passes by the fact that the wording of the previous sentence made it do more than talk about butler's verbal style. it's a question of the use and abuse of rhetoric, which is surely relevant. i'm sure butler or someone like her could do a lot with the implicit yoking of clarity to intellectual capacity (in fact that's pretty much one of the main themes of the adorno passages she likes to cite when defending herself against criticisms like this one).

tbh, the argument that you don't have to be able to make yourself understood to be considered intelligent is one of the things that made me turn to sciences over philosophy, so we are basically arguing at cross-purposes

academics can be shitty to each other. i never "attack" someone else's argument, but try to argue im "using" it or differentiating myself from it. i hate the dick measuring.

you are being very good-natured itt, ryan

i'm sure butler or someone like her could do a lot with the implicit yoking of clarity to intellectual capacity

Dude, they are explicitly not yoked! The sentences are:

JB is very smart
JB can listen and talk real good
JB doesn't write good

the implication being that she can but doesn't.

If you're extremely paranoid about all the possible ways somebody would want to misread you in order to attack not what you're actually saying, but you personally (possibly for no other reason than egotism) then you're going to tend to drown what you're saying in lots of qualifiers and conditionals.

this is partly a culture-of-this-stuff too i think? like when you have whole books written about a person's use of a single word you are always going to be hyper conscious of your own word choice. you dont want this essay youve spent months working on to be dismissed or torn apart b/c you were clumsy

or xp what other ppl said

you are being very good-natured itt, ryan

haha, i kinda regret losing my temper a bit upthread. no one is being "obnoxious."

http://www.sfu.ca/~swartz/blood_sport.htm

iatee-- i do think you are making an interesting point. especially in terms of Plato's "esoteric" philosophy and things like that. there does seem to be certain barriers set up designed to impede the novice or layman, to prevent easy understanding and "hide" the true meaning.

yeah I mean - again - I don't think that 'obfuscation can be used as a tool by certain people/groups in certain contexts' is limited to academia. and the opacity in our financial sector is something that affects us all a lot more than 'judith butler is hard to read'.

i don't think i was making that argument, djp. i think both nussbaum and butler probably have points in their favor (e.g. there ARE problems with butler's prose, and there ARE certain assumptions and power structures coded into the prose that nussbaum favors). i was only pointing out a place where in the process of trying to smack butler down, nussbaum does just the kind of thing that motivates some of butler's choices about prose in the first place. and i think if nussbaum were trying to engage with more integrity she might not have gone for that easy backhand, because it detracts from the defense of the value of clear prose that she wants to make.

or rather Philosophy as a Blood Sport

one time in an undergrad feminist theory class i took a woman, almost tearfully, declared of an excerpt from bodies that matter that we had been assigned, "i just feel really...oppressed by this text." i had been inclined to be hard on jb for her difficulty, but that girl was so annoying it turned me the other way.

the opacity in our financial sector is something that affects us all a lot more than 'judith butler is hard to read'.

surely. and i think if Butler was interested in writing a book that would have a direct activist or political dimension for a wide range of people she's surely capable of producing it, though it's quite possible she is trying to avoid that effect in her actual writing. I should shut up because I can't speak for JB, tho i do think that's a motive for other writers.

recently i read some interviews with adorno around the time of the student demonstrations (like the 'breast incident'!!!!). i knew before that he had denied his intention to have directly practical effects with his theorizing, but i was surprised at how blunt, emphatic he was about it in interview. i could certainly see how butler could have picked up a similar rationale for her, uh, stance.

i basically come down on the side of butler here, i.e. she is not writing for you, she's writing for a specialized audience that actually does know the lingo. it's not much more complicated than that is it?

that said, our "public intellectuals" - our greatest minds! - have been awfully absent from the world stage as the entire world drives off a cliff. not saying that everybody needs to be directly political all the time, but if not now, when? chomsky is a bit head-in-the-sand with this stuff, but it's hard not to sympathize with this:

There has been a striking change in the behavior of the intellectual class in recent years. The left intellectuals who 60 years ago would have been teaching in working class schools, writing books like "mathematics for the millions" (which made mathematics intelligible to millions of people), participating in and speaking for popular organizations, etc., are now largely disengaged from such activities, and although quick to tell us that they are far more radical than thou, are not to be found, it seems, when there is such an obvious and growing need and even explicit request for the work they could do out there in the world of people with live problems and concerns. That's not a small problem. This country, right now, is in a very strange and ominous state. People are frightened, angry, disillusioned, skeptical, confused. That's an organizer's dream, as I once heard Mike say. It's also fertile ground for demagogues and fanatics, who can (and in fact already do) rally substantial popular support with messages that are not unfamiliar from their predecessors in somewhat similar circumstances. We know where it has led in the past; it could again. There's a huge gap that once was at least partially filled by left intellectuals willing to engage with the general public and their problems.

http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/chomsky-on-postmodernism.html

i think that's fair. it's partly of the realization that doing that kind of public service is no long doing "theory"--so i think they worry about being compromised in some sense. but that's a fear they should perhaps get over. it should be understood that taking position X doesn't mean "i have a foundational philosophical argument for X."

that said, our "public intellectuals" - our greatest minds! - have been awfully absent from the world stage as the entire world drives off a cliff.

otm

(in fact, perhaps insisting on the value of that distinction between "position X" as a pragmatic and situational necessity and the absence of a foundational argument for X points to something academics have to offer the public arena)

The left intellectuals who 60 years ago would have been teaching in working class schools, writing books like "mathematics for the millions"

Seems a bit weird given that there are TONS of books explaining math to general readers coming out every year, many of them by professional mathematicians.

there should be more teaching math at occupy wall street

eephus haha yes - chomsky wrote the above in 1995 and it has dated a little bit

http://mathbabe.org/category/ows/

xp: that was in response to iatee: yes, math people are involved with OWS and consider it important to inject mathematical literacy into the conversation.

feel like we're overdue a brian cox/tristram hunt type figure, some photogenic academic with a tv show designed to bring ~philosophy to the masses~

nah even when ows was going on *on campuses* it was undergrads and some grad students w/ a few professors writing editorials "I believe pepper spraying ppl is bad"

this is sorta its own issue tho

feel like we're overdue a brian cox/tristram hunt type figure, some photogenic academic with a tv show designed to bring ~philosophy to the masses~

― first period don't give a fuck, second period gon get cut (lex pretend)

he's not photogenic but was this not alain de botton. i mean this was his first series:

Philosophy: A Guide To Happiness (from The Consolations of Philosophy)

Socrates on Self-Confidence
Epicurus on Happiness
Seneca on Anger
Montaigne on Self-Esteem
Schopenhauer on Love
Nietzsche on Hardship (featuring Cathal Grealish)

oh god alain de botton

rev run wisdom for middle class white people. so trite so facile

searches for anyone bitching about him on twitter and passive aggressively follows them :(

1) i dont know what anyone hopes to accomplish by taking tiny bits of texts out of their totally enormous context and then demonstrating their supposed incomprehensibility.

2) it's truly obnoxious that people feel like they can wade into something that I, and other people on this thread, do and pronounce upon it with some sense of authority as if they've, say, spent any time at all trying to read Heidegger (or whoever). He's not writing a goddamn manifesto for mass consumption. You don't have to read and like Heidegger (again, just an example) but if you don't im not gonna take anything you say about him seriously.

3) said this umpteen times: the desire for clear and precise language/communication is something being interrogated in these texts. in fact, most of them find it impossible, and thus clearness is suspect as best.

4) academia does, im sure, incentivize complexity. sometimes bad writing happens. but also it's important to realize complexity is something that HAPPENS to discourses as they evolve. as I pointed out elsewhere, medieval theology is an example of a discourse of comparable complexity (if not moreso) that took place largely outside of the modern academic "publish or perish" context.

...5) also tired of the notion that these hugely popular writers (relatively speaking) are somehow popular due to the mass delusions and insecurities of graduate students.

― ryan, Thursday, February 16, 2012 7:46 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark

since this was directly targeted at my take on that short heidegger quote, lemme say a few things.

1) someone posted a chunk of heidegger. i tried to break it down. since this is a thread dedicated to academic inscrutability, this didn't seem unreasonable.

2) regardless of how "obnoxious" it might seem from your position of "some authority", i maintain that i "can" have and voice my own opinion on this stuff. fwiw, i have read heidegger. not a lot, but enough to get a grip on the relationship of form to content in his writing.

3) this is a very thin excuse for the obfuscatory tendencies in question, outside the work of a few writers.

4) medieval theology was essentially a branch of philosophy. philosophy has long prized inscrutability and intellectual grandstanding, and those medieval scholars were doing exactly the same thing as the academics of today: trying to make their arguments seem more complex and impressive than they really are.

5) the most popular philosophers & theorists are, i assume, popular for good reason - because their ideas are compelling. this doesn't mean that their writing doesn't display the same sins as that of less notable figures in their fields.

i would love to see some of your more necessarily complex writing, max. you know, just to get some idea of where yr coming from on this.

David Brooks on White GOP Guilt

said "max", meant "ryan", sorry

4) medieval theology was essentially a branch of philosophy. philosophy has long prized inscrutability and intellectual grandstanding, and those medieval scholars were doing exactly the same thing as the academics of today: trying to make their arguments seem more complex and impressive than they really are.

no way

pretty sure Meister Eckhardt and Nicholas of Cusa are just frontin'

lotta sour grapes itt

haha, i kinda regret losing my temper a bit upthread. no one is being "obnoxious."

― ryan, Thursday, February 16, 2012 9:24 AM (42 minutes ago) Bookmark

oops, missed this. ty, ryan.

Liked that Chomsky article, pretty much the same reasons why I didn't go for a Ph.D in English. A lot of theory seems like Latin sermons dressing up lay experiences at best, and total junk at worst, and the departments I got into were primarily interested in theory. Couldn't stomach the idea of dedicating my life to that.

good post

what did you do instead

I take your points, contenderizer, even if I don't agree :)

I feel, however, that providing any examples of necessarily complex writing (other than names of writers) is a trap! I'm defending the practice, not any specific writing which may or may not be good writing.

Seems a bit weird given that there are TONS of books explaining math to general readers coming out every year, many of them by professional mathematicians.

― Guayaquil (eephus!), Thursday, 16 February 2012 17:47 (22 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

totally off-topic, but the very short introduction to maths by tim gowers is probably the best pop higher maths i've ever read and if you are interested in what higher maths is, or what mathematics "do" then i cannot recommend it enough.

shouldn't the thread title have "obfuscatory" instead of "obfuscated"...?

what did you do instead

― iatee, Thursday, February 16, 2012 1:12 PM (1 minute ago)

ended up in a half-way house where I spent most of my time sitting on a bare mattress pressed up against the wall, smoking cigarettes in my underwear and staring into space.

well using the verb highlights the fact that it's on some level someone doin it and not just a thing that exists

xp

xp copywriting and law school actually. not to slam academia, it has its own goals and such, personal decision, etc. anyway...

no abstruse lingo or bad writing in the law

like I said in the other thread, the existence of bad writing in other fields doesn't get the humanities off the hook

― iatee, Thursday, February 16, 2012 9:43 AM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

there is bad writing everywhere! it is a tool!

that said, our "public intellectuals" - our greatest minds! - have been awfully absent from the world stage as the entire world drives off a cliff.

― TracerHandVEVO (Tracer Hand), Thursday, February 16, 2012 9:35 AM (33 minutes ago) Bookmark

i think that the absence of public intellectuals from the world stage has everything to do with the core topic of this thread. academic philosophy and critical theory seem to desire nothing more than to wall themselves off from the rest of the world, to present themselves as above and beyond "ordinary" thought and discourse. they are not. these are ho-hum, everyday things that everyone does. if the ideas involved in philosophy and critical theory were presented with a bit more clarity and humility, it would quickly become obvious that this stuff isn't anywhere near as "difficult" as it is so often made to seem (both by outsiders and by academics themselves). most people don't realize this because they've been taught that that these disciplines are impossibly inscrutable ivory tower pursuits, and it flatters academics to maintain this fiction. the problem is that it results in the near total divorce of academic discourse from the world it purports to describe.

I'm amused by the idea that contenderizer should not presume to analyze Heidigger, because Heidigger is (cue the trumpets) Heidigger and contenderizer is just some runt on the internet. I'm equally amused by the idea that contenderizer lacks sufficient warrant to analyze Heidigger, because his head is not burrowed into academia as tightly as a tick in a dog's hide.

These are simply appeals to authority and can only impress someone who has invested themselves in upholding the authority being cited. Otherwise, it is no more persuasive than citing the Bible to an atheist. I happen to be an atheist when it comes to the innate authority of academics.

otoh, I voted false in this poll.

that wasn't the objection

and while humanities academia might not be the only place that uses bad writing as a tool, unlike law, business, medicine, whatever - society doesn't really know 'what they do', doesn't see tangible results from the process, and when people don't know what humanities phds do, people don't nec. think it's an important social goal to find jobs for humanities phds. which puts us...basically where we are now. and 'where we are now' = a model for funding this work that depends on an infinite stream of 18 y/os willing to pay tens of thousands of dollars to take an intro to plato class.

that wasn't the objection

― Critique of Pure Moods (goole), Thursday, February 16, 2012 10:46 AM (11 minutes ago) Bookmark

was pretty clearly implied, imo

that wasn't the objection

that seemed to be the sum and substance of dayo's critique

yikes

I was just pointing out that contenderizer's exercise was akin to excerpting a few sentences from the brothers karamazov and saying "who is alyosha? why doesn't dostoevsky tell us who alyosha is? this book is crap! dostoevsky doesn't know how to write!"

the objection was that if you're going to talk about heidegger you should read more than one paragraph of heidegger

not that 'little people' don't have the 'right' to talk about him or some shit

i thought that quote was pretty cool but i really regret posting it at this point, sorry guys

btw heidegger was a nazi when he says "gods" he means "hitler" <--- close reading

xp to dayo

except c-zer was clear that he understood that the quoted chunk was missing context, and he anticipated this criticism by acknowledging that it limited his analysis. fwiw, your analogy is pretty weak, too.

when you base your criticism on the claim that something taken out of context sounds like a non sequitur, I'm gonna rmde pretty hard

was more about how ideas were conveyed and how language was used within that small piece. wasn't taking down heidegger, just griping about the construction of one very famous quotation.

sort of like bitching about a song. if i'm using my objection to a song, or part of a song, to imply that the artist sucks in all ways, then that's ridiculous. but if i'm specifically objecting to what's actually going on in that one, small piece of music, then that's aok.

that seems like a p bad analogy to be fair

xp - you conveyed the rmde part of your rebuttal very thoroughly. you were a bit light on actually leaning on the crowbar to demolish him.

so i'll try a little self-justification here. let's be fun and use an example from mysticism, not because it's hard or complex, but because it works as a statement of purpose (and happens to be quoted in a book on my desk).

For everything that is understood and sensed is nothing but the apparition of what is not apparent, the manifestation of the hidden, the affirmation of the negated, the comprehension of the incomprehensible... -- John Scottus Eriugena, Periphyseon

Now, it's reasonable to read that think "ok, that's kind of a difficult idea, but it's expressed clearly, and uses terms that are generally understood. Why not just stop THERE? why all the convoluted prose?" Why, indeed, keep writing?

Well, that's precisely the problem. To stop there is to totally collapse the entire idea. If you stop there, if you just say THAT, you're being false to the very thing you are describing. We can't pass over in silence like the early Wittgenstein wanted (before he couldn't shut up) because even silence "hides" what it expresses.

a lot of post-structuralist thought is the secularization of this idea. the possibility of a mystical experience is gone (or at least the possibility of communicating about it). so what happens?

Nicholas of Cusa talks about the "coincidence of opposites." In the 20th century we get the collusion of sense and non-sense (Deleuze), we "forget" Being (Heidegger), we speak of supplements (Derrida) or the environment (Luhmann). But every one of these terms fails, intentionally, and the exploration of that failure is enacted in their prose.

There are two forces at work in Derrida, for example. there's the systematic allure of language, it's attempt at closure, and Derrida's attempt to pry it open, make it bear witness to what it cannot express. we can't just leave what we can't speak about alone, because that very surplus makes meaning possible, it disrupts and destabilizes it at every turn.

the question for a philosopher today is simple: how do you talk about what is "outside" or occluded from the inside? how do you talk about how language operates USING language?

fart

il n'y a pas de hors-fart

i should add that in no way is anyone required to care about those ideas. if you get a kick out of that pursuit (i obviously do) then it's pretty rewarding. if you don't, then ignore it.

yeah the prob w/ that philosophy (lol) is that if you want someone to pay you to do what you do you need people to think it's good for society that you do what you do

basically no one gets paid for doing that stuff.

right, and 'no one' is gonna be even more 'no one' soon

yep. I'm sure Butler makes good money but I'd be curious if her books even turn a profit.

Here's what I think is an amazing passage from Michel Serres:

Chaos is open, it gapes wide, it is not a closed system. In order to code, one has to close, in order to class, one has to define, or shut off with a boundary. Chaos is patent. It is not a system, it is multiplicity. It is multiple, unexpected. Chaos flows, it flows out, an Albula, a white river. I hear a silky white noise, hardly smooth, with little jumping, jolting bits. A white river would not have any direction or precise bank, it wanders, nebulous. Chaos is nebulous. It does not flow out with a point or a direction, or following some rule, or abiding by some law. Look how much trouble we have thinking it or seeing it. The whole of reason protests--I mean logically. Our whole classified rationality, all the coding, habits and methods, lead us to speak in externals or negations: outlaw and nonsense. But I say positive chaos. Spinoza does not say otherwise: determination is negation. Indetermination is thus positive, and yet we express it with a negative word. I am simply writing the positive concepts of the under-determined, the undetermined, the positive concepts of the possible, thus the positive concepts of time: the nebulous, the blank, the mix, the surge, the chaos, the adelos multiplicities--I mean the ones that aren't obvious, that are poorly defined, confused. Instead of being excluded, rejected, confusion becomes an object, it enters the realm of knowledge, it enters into its movement. And it is classification, on the contrary, that is negative, it is coding that operates in a negative manner, it is the concept, in general, an determination, that is a negation. Our reasoning is negative as a whole, it cannot and does not know how to say yes except with a double no, conjecture and refutation, hypothesis and critique, it is given over as a whole to the work of the negative, and I understand finally why death, so often, is its result, its outcome or consequence and why hatred is, so frequently, its driving force. And why rationalism comes under the heading of the sacred, why rationalists are priests, busily ruling out, cleaning up the filth, expelling people, purifying bodies or ideas. Behold the positive chaos, the casting mold, the matrix. And behold the pure possible.

Well, that's precisely the problem. To stop there is to totally collapse the entire idea. If you stop there, if you just say THAT, you're being false to the very thing you are describing. We can't pass over in silence like the early Wittgenstein wanted (before he couldn't shut up) because even silence "hides" what it expresses.

are you really saying that an academic philosophical/critical text concerning the unknowability of things and the shadow of mysticism in the post-mystical world would be internally inconsistent if it didn't attempt to generate a sense of mystical unknowability? that seems absurd on the face of it.

the question for a philosopher today is simple: how do you talk about what is "outside" or occluded from the inside? how do you talk about how language operates USING language?

this would actually be very simple. it's not at all hard to express the quandary of being part of and thus limited by the system one is trying to perceive and describe, to get at the ways in which our conceptual tools enclose our understanding. like you say, it's a pretty simple observation. there are only so many ways and times that one can say "wow, we're at the limits of what we can know here" before it becomes tedious and trivial.

not only would it be internally inconsistent, it HAS to be.

there is no "internally consistent" discourse, in other words.

^^ the train reaches the roundhouse

the snake eat its tail

yep. I'm sure Butler makes good money but I'd be curious if her books even turn a profit.

― ryan, Thursday, February 16, 2012 3:00 PM (7 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

do you think this is a good thing? cause I don't.

what are ways you think humanities academia could fight this trend? how can the humanities make themselves 'relevant' to most of society? do you think butleresque prose is a step in the right direction or a step in the wrong direction with that in mind?

believe me that's a going concern in humanities departments. i dont have any good answers.

and are there a bunch of superior-feeling intellectually obfuscating dicks in humanities departments? oh definitely. it's messy out there. i just want to defend the idea of this kind of writing because it means something to me and i enjoy it.

my gf is in humanities grad school and so that's really the extent that
I care about this. her department doesn't seem particularly concerned, because they have tenure and make plenty of money. I don't think navel-gazing academia is good for the world, but more importantly, I don't think navel-gazing academia is good for academia. as things continue to fall apart, research that doesn't have inherent economic-value needs to find a way to be funded, and unlike other types of academic research, exxon-mobil isn't gonna be there to pay for her to study barthes.

yeah it's troubling. i think for the sake of this thread im considering it as something worth pursuing for its own sake, and not necessarily something I can monetize.

in any case, Derrida of all people has a classic essay on this problem, "The University Without Condition." I can't find it online at the moment, but it's very readable!

yep. I'm sure Butler makes good money but I'd be curious if her books even turn a profit.

― ryan, Thursday, February 16, 2012 3:00 PM (7 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I'd be surprised if they don't. Thousands of library sales from the off, they're on tons of reading lists so more sales + course-materials reproduction rights for extracts. Obvs I'm not saying she's a bestseller, but then I don't imagine her advances are huge. (But the ac publishing infrastructure not exactly stable at the mo at a guess)

yeah i bet she gets published by some good presses. a lot, if not most, academic presses operate at a loss as far as i know.

no offense, ryan, but that serres passage on "chaos" is ridiculous. he's got exactly one interesting observation buried in that morass: reason's implicit negation of possibility/multiplicity/chaos is perhaps what makes it appealing to religious authorities, "busily ruling out, cleaning up the filth, expelling people, purifying bodies or ideas." cool, but it's not even particularly novel.

the rest is just really, really bad poetry. an endless "white river" of choking language attached to a few simple observations: chaos is infinite, open, undetermined in a positive way. it gives rise to possibility. knowing, naming and rational thinking close these possibilities, and thus could be described as "destructive" to the open-ended nature of the unknown, unnamed and unthought. fair enough, but hardly earth-shaking.

worst of all are the closing sentences abt how reason "cannot and does not know how to say yes" and how the author understands "finally why death, so often, is its result, its outcome or consequence and why hatred is, so frequently, its driving force. that seems really juvenile, tbh. for one thing how does "its result, its outcome or consequence" say anything that "its result" doesn't? for another, really really? dude is actually making a blanket claim about hatred being reason's impulse and death its outcome? ffs.

xp

The big books seem to be with routledge in the uk, so commercial academic rather than university press.

I'm sure she makes good money, but 'be the most famous person in your discipline' is not a business model that can be followed by >1 person

contend: it's not worth anyone's time to get into a back and forth over it, especially since i fell for your trap by posting an example! but i will say i think you've only scratched the surface of it. that's actually the end of a short book, and it's bringing (quite beautifully imo) all the themes of the book to a head. it's pretty dense with allusion, and it's even meant to be pleasurable, i imagine. but on the other hand i posted it out of context so fair game, my bad.

that serres passage is a whole lot of repetition put to the service of nothing particularly enlightening. what am i meant to be blown away by? there aren't any sentences i find incomprehensible in it, but i don't understand what his point is, what he's trying to convey, why i should find value in it. it's under-written if anything cuz there's nothing substantial in there, just purple prose. he doesn't succeed in convincing me that what he fixates on is important.

idk i think there's a lot to work with in that serres bit. def seems a lot like the 'meditative' or 'poetic' kind of mode i was talking about re: derrida up there

xps

Instead of being excluded, rejected, confusion becomes an object, it enters the realm of knowledge, it enters into its movement.

that's p cool

i love abstract language used in evocative and mystical ways that i don't necessarily "understand", but ime philosophers tend not to be as good at this as poets, who also don't lay claim to insight or authority

I'm sure she makes good money, but 'be the most famous person in your discipline' is not a business model that can be followed by >1 person

― iatee, Thursday, February 16, 2012 8:30 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I agree - there's very little space, and will be less space (after a few rounds of humanities cuts & a huge fight over e-textbooks), for academic philosophical prose to make money – there are maybe a dozen names you'd feel confident publishing, & even then I'm sure it's knife edge finances.

i think it's fair to reject Serres on aesthetic grounds. there are always other ways of saying things. i just like the way he says it.

Instead of being excluded, rejected, confusion becomes an object, it enters the realm of knowledge, it enters into its movement.

i don't even recognise this as a thing that happens. who excludes or rejects confusion? it's integral to our lives. of course confusion helps us understand ourselves.

also strike through either "excluded" or "rejected" ffs, there are way too many commas in that piece and it is HORRIBLE stylistically

strike through last clause too, says nothing that the previous clause didn't.

I did a level 1 OU course sociology/philosophy which skimmed some of this stuff ( including foucault and weber on power structures ). I found it really hard to separate the "poetry" from the "theory", decided it was beyond my little brain and went on to do maths instead. Ryan, are you saying it's basically all about the poetry after all, and I needn't have fretted & revolted?

I liked that Serres passage. Reminds me of thinking how our consciousness is just an incident of our biology, and so our conception of the world and types of thinking are formed by that. But I didn't read the whole book, so don't know if I'm on point there.

contend: it's not worth anyone's time to get into a back and forth over it, especially since i fell for your trap by posting an example! but i will say i think you've only scratched the surface of it. that's actually the end of a short book, and it's bringing (quite beautifully imo) all the themes of the book to a head. it's pretty dense with allusion, and it's even meant to be pleasurable, i imagine. but on the other hand i posted it out of context so fair game, my bad.

― ryan, Thursday, February 16, 2012 12:30 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark

thanks for not going off on me, ryan. lex otm, though: i think maybe we just like different kinds of poetry.

it's not reducible to poetry because it's not art. but all writing is designed to achieve a certain "affect" and this stuff is no different. Serres is an extreme example. Someone like Luhmann is as dry as possible, also for effect. I've joked that reading Heidegger is a lot like reading Lao-Tzu. that part where you brain breaks and you have an "unthought" is kinda what he's aiming for sometimes.

as far as i can make out serres is saying:

1. rationalism works through defining, which is a kind of walling-off, boxing, or excluding
1b. we think of this as being 'positive' but it isn't
2. 'chaos' is all the mental or experiential or just existing stuff that is being excluded (or maybe the totality of things before the act of definition).
2b. we think of this as being 'negative' but it isn't either, creation (or creativity? or some kind of pre-linguistic or pre-human state of things, idk) is chaotic
3. the walling-off never really work anyway because the unknown, uncanny, undefined, unaccountable, etc, creeps back into what we think we know etc.

maybe.

yeah this reads like a very old kind of mysticism to me. but also a basic kind of scientific attitude, "the map is not the territory" etc.

iirc another reason 20th century theory never clicked with me is that, insofar as i could discern the ideas beneath the uh "poetry", they didn't exactly blow my mind; they didn't explain things i felt, i didn't recognise their descriptions of the human condition. reading lacan on desire, i found i had to start conceptualising "desire" as something completely separate to anything that actually exists irl. it didn't actually teach me anything new or useful about desire.

i think max said something about allowing yourself to get lost in the language regardless of whether you "understand" what's going on - i find it a lot easier to do this with literature (mason & dixon springs to mind, for large stretches of it at any rate, but so good to lose yourself in) but w/philosophy or theory i just get bored.

I don't understand this sentence at all : "it's not reducible to poetry because it's not art"

why isn't it art? why is poetry a reduction?

i think this raises an equally interesting problem about other forms of communication, like art or poetry. look at how they've evolved from the representational to the non-representational. read some Wallace Stevens. are these analogous to what's happened to philosophy?

^ yes i think

why isn't it art? why is poetry a reduction?

was wondering the same thing. a lot of the justifications offered for the style and affect of this type of writing seem indistinguishable from the ways in which we describe the aims of art.

why isn't it art? why is poetry a reduction?

i use "reducible" because i dont think philosophy and poetry can be collapsed together because they have different histories, expectations, forms, and the like.

i think this raises an equally interesting problem about other forms of communication, like art or poetry. look at how they've evolved from the representational to the non-representational. read some Wallace Stevens. are these analogous to what's happened to philosophy?

it sometimes seems so

i would argue that they are all forms of "communication" however and share certain aims in that respect.

ha i don't have yen to dig into philosophy much on my 'own time', but when i do it's usually people who were into things i consider basically evil, like strauss or maybe robert nozick

i dont think philosophy and poetry can be collapsed together because they have different histories, expectations, forms, and the like.

― ryan, Thursday, February 16, 2012 12:52 PM (9 seconds ago) Bookmark

OTM, and that's exactly what's wrong with the "poetification" (or artification or w/e) of philosophy. art has a history and expectation-set in which things like abstraction, interpretation-averseness, transgression, and the like make sense, have real value. this is simply not true of philosophy. the more it becomes "non-representational", the less useful it becomes as philosophy.

idk The Republic is written as a series of conversations between a semi-fictionalized character and other people in the town

yeah, but plato is much more difficult than he has any good reason to be. and, fwiw, a series of philosophical conversations is pretty "representational" when it comes to philosophy as art. point taken, though. i'm perfectly happy to grant that the obfuscatory tendencies in question might partially be the result of philosophy treating itself as an abstract, nonrepresentational art form.

This thread is fascinating!

on philosophical writing as a kind of art-literature: that's how i read derrida and barthes, tbh. but i don't think the tendency has been at all healthy for the field as a whole.

"abstraction, interpretation aversenessness and transgression" dont have a history in philosophy?!

i phrased that imprecisely. i think art has done a good job of making a case for the value of things like "abstraction, interpretation aversenessness and transgression" in art, especially in art-as-aesthetics.

otoh, i think philosophy has done a spectacularly poor job of making the case for the value of such things in philosophical writing and thinking. there's definitely a history, but not a good one.

unless were talking about different things i think the case for abstraction and transgression in philosophy is p clear-cut?

Ok, so for some basic clarification, when non-music humanities people talk about "theory", this is what they're talking about?: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literary_theory

And that's basically the sort of "academic language" that this thread is mostly concerned with? (Because it doesn't seem to relate to the academic language I read and write. I was originally expecting this thread to be about academic language in a much more general sense.)

There's a niche within musicology that is influenced by this sort of scholarship but I've never thought of it as the mainstream of musicology at all. (Caveat: I'm not a musicologist although I teach musicological courses.) And music theory obviously doesn't relate to this at all, outside semiology which is still a bit fringe-y.

"outside of semiology"

philosophy ≠ theory btw & there's lots of philosophy that bears on the world today e.g. my kinda philosophy of science / logic / mathematics, also political philosophy in the Rawlsian tradition, experimental philosophy. We get NSF grants, private foundation money, "dialogue" with scientists / politicians / etc. We don't get along well with what you guys call the "humanities", but I'm not sure that's a problem---well, it is when we try to compete for internal university grants b/c the English / cult. studies people don't fund us (b/c math is hard?), but we can live without that.

Sund4r the papers you posted earlier were great and I'm really jealous of someone that gets to do that AS A JOB!

basically I think we're talking about http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmodernism and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_theory

yeah, but plato is much more difficult than he has any good reason to be

come on he does have some good reasons to be difficult. 3 that come to mind: 2,500 years ago; giant cultural gap between us and Greek city states; shortcomings of the surviving classical record mean context is a bit thin.

yeah logic and mathy philosophy has 'economic value' in a way that poststructuralism doesn't xp

like, for most of western history, the function of art was to represent, to instruct, to entertain, to be beautiful, and to embody ideals. this construction meant that art was still useful as art even when it was no longer representational. it could still be beautiful, diverting, instructive or whatever.

the function of philosophy was, by and large, to logically explore the the relationship of the human mind to the world - focusing on concepts like seeming, thinking, meaning and being - and to explain the nature of that relationship and the things it comprises. the twin tasks of exploring and explaining defined philosophy's mission, and they couldn't be easily separated. the shift within critical theory to a focus on an artlike conception in which things like "abstraction, interpretation aversenessness and transgression" have a place in the formal construction of philosophy was therefore harmful to philosophy-as-philosophy. the discipline can't easily incorporate these things and still effectively do its job. unless you conceive of its job as "employing philosophers".

not that that should be a marker of worth, but it is a p good marker of 'who's gonna be left standing when the storm winds pick up'

xp to self sorry Sund4r, I did mean ... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-Structuralism

conflating crit theory and philosophy i know, but i think of the former as a subdiscipline within the latter

is there some website where people record the "comprehensibility scores" of various texts from e.g. Microsoft Word? like "grade level" or whatever other syntactic measures linguists have recently cooked up; would be fun to see how Butler (who I'd never heard of before this thread) or Derrida (lol) or Kant or Quine come out on those measures...but I don't feel like bothering to do the computations myself.

there's really no way you could do that

like how do you score the term 'althusserian'? well, that depends who you are and how it's being used and how dense the sentence is.

we used to run out shit through Word to get those scores back in the day, I'm guessing it's still in there? dunno, I avoid Word o/w but those measures are worth something, if not much.

xp true, but it's not just the jargon but also the syntactic complexity that's at issue here, & we could gauge if the latter's an issue via these measures, even if not the former

Thanks, thomasintrouble, that helps. OK, Adorno is part of my world, yes.

So, my next question is: how dominant is this sort of scholarship in other disciplines? Is e.g. Butler required undergraduate reading for anyone?

iirc, the algorithms for readability scores are very simple-minded, counting the number of words in a sentence and finding the average length of the words used, for example.

like how do you score the term 'althusserian'? well, that depends who you are and how it's being used and how dense the sentence is.

― iatee, Thursday, February 16, 2012 9:31 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i am loling at everyone head scratching at 'althusserian' btw

i was using it in papers when i was 19 and i forget i was in this weird bubble

Also, I should get off the computer and mark some Bartok analyses. Back later tonight.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunning_fog_index

those machines seem to score on average word & sentence length (longer is better!), the unusualness of words (less familiar is better!), the complexity of grammar (more tangled is better!) and the observation of basic spelling & grammar rules.

suspect that clause-laden, 200-word sentences of poetic critspeak would consistently score at the highest grade level possible. which is, i suspect, why they exist in the first place: because the human mind decodes things in a similar manner.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flesch%E2%80%93Kincaid_readability_test

I'm sure more complicated readability scores exist w/r/t syntactic complexity, but you can't underestimate the effect of jargon. and the way jargon combines w/ poorly written sentences.

xp ah there you go

I want to see the results of putting ilx in that test, year by year

ok I don't write often in Word but I just ran it on a review I wrote in Word for a mainstream analytic philosophy journal, & it gets a Flesch Reading Ease score of 30.9 & a Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level of 12.0

you could prob pass 12th grade imo

I want to see the results of putting ilx in that test, year by year

― iatee, Thursday, 16 February 2012 21:40 (37 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

graph of y=1/x ( x>0 )

^ needs more negative infinity

That Butler excerpt from above gets a Flesch Reading Ease score of 0.0 btw

Flesch otm

if we ran ilx through a reading score program, how would it score all the youtubes, jpgs and gifs, I wonder?

jpg = 8th grade
gif = 3rd grade
youtube = 1st grade

i miss you youtube=pre-k

this thread:

Flesch Reading Ease: 57.0
Flesch-Kinkaid Grade Level: 9.5

the function of philosophy was, by and large, to logically explore the the relationship of the human mind to the world - focusing on concepts like seeming, thinking, meaning and being - and to explain the nature of that relationship and the things it comprises. the twin tasks of exploring and explaining defined philosophy's mission, and they couldn't be easily separated. the shift within critical theory to a focus on an artlike conception in which things like "abstraction, interpretation aversenessness and transgression" have a place in the formal construction of philosophy was therefore harmful to philosophy-as-philosophy. the discipline can't easily incorporate these things and still effectively do its job. unless you conceive of its job as "employing philosophers".

even philosophy on the conception you describe here is historical - aristotle's use of the views of the 'wise' among his predecessors would be an example. i think a great deal of the embrace of, essentially, the tools of art and rhetoric for philosophical purposes was motivated by criticism internal to philosophy. particularly as human cultures changed and made the characteristics that pertain more to particular human beings (their situatedness, their embodiment, their emotional investment in the world, their social existences) rather than abstractly conceived human beings ('universal' or 'essentially' human) seem essential, or at least ineliminable, for the core aims of philosophy as traditionally conceived. which caused philosophy to change. you can claim that it was a change for the worse, or that it was appropriate at the time but that we have now incorporated the reasoning or insights originally leading to the change, or whatever - but making that argument is now internal to philosophy, rather than being just a matter of policing the borders between proper philosophy and, for example, charlatanery or attitudinizing or however it's characterized.

i think max said something about allowing yourself to get lost in the language regardless of whether you "understand" what's going on - i find it a lot easier to do this with literature (mason & dixon springs to mind, for large stretches of it at any rate, but so good to lose yourself in) but w/philosophy or theory i just get bored.

― first period don't give a fuck, second period gon get cut (lex pretend), Thursday, February 16, 2012 3:46 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah i dont know if its always worth getting lost in the "language" -- w/ like derrida or nietzsche or whomever, the really good writers, i think its worth it -- but definitely if you have a decent secondary and know what youre looking for, or what the concepts and ideas at play are, i like just sort of diving in and looking for patterns, ideas, echoes, etc. u know: vibing w/ the text

actually the more i think/write about this the more i realize that some kind of education in the histories and concepts is sort of "essential" to my enjoyment? a lot of what i get out of reading say derrida or butler is picking out the patterns and games theyre playing, patterns & games that stretch back across a lot of work

j, can you explain "internal to philosophy" please? I'm not sure how to interpret it.

There certainly are measures of syntactic reading complexity (I'd have to look them up) but they would be non-trivial to implement - you need to be running a decent parser to get reliable numbers.

thomas, i mean something like, responsive to the standards of inquiry and criticism which philosophy has tried to adhere to. but i also mean 'internal to' in the sense that as an intellectual practice with a history of its own, philosophers have tended to have a loosely shared mutual sense of the point of what they are doing and a rough sense of what counts as meaningful efforts to do that thing. whatever other standards a new contribution to that tradition meets or doesn't meet, philosophers tend to reckon, against their shared sense of what they're doing, the value of the new work depending on whether it's responsive to but critical of the tradition. i think that the reason a lot of 'artistic' or 'rhetorical' philosophical work has made it partway into the tradition as a whole is that it's satisfied looser criteria like that.

I'm curious about the ratio of ppl who have talked about things as "Althusserian" vs. ppl who have actually spent significant time working through Althusser as situated in his actual historic intellectual context.

This is really a broader pet peeve of mine that has nothing to do with butler or whoever, and nothing to do with althusser either.

j. I think it's important again to restate that this is only a small portion of what gets classed as "philosophy," especially in the states.

sure. but i think a similar explanation is relevant to why most of what gets classed as philosophy in the u.s. is so.

as an intellectual practice with a history of its own, philosophers have tended to have a loosely shared mutual sense of the point of what they are doing and a rough sense of what counts as meaningful efforts to do that thing. whatever other standards a new contribution to that tradition meets or doesn't meet, philosophers tend to reckon, against their shared sense of what they're doing, the value of the new work depending on whether it's responsive to but critical of the tradition.

that makes an enormous amount of sense, and it helps explain why philosophy has become such a hermetic discipline. in this conception, philosophy defines its own mission and function, is beholden to no other audience or method of evaluation, and engages only with itself. one of the weirdest things about philosophy today is that it often doesn't seem to be "about" the world or the human experience or w/e, but simply about philosophy itself. like philosophy is seen by most "philosophy professionals" as the study of philosophy itself, rather than as a common practice with everyday utility that's engaged (two-way engaged) with all other aspects of life.

there's nothing really wrong with any of that, but it's a hall of mirrors, and to the extent that the participants are professionally dependent on impressing their peers, i expect that it encourages the sins we're discussing in this thread.

seen by most "philosophy professionals" as the study of philosophy itself

By the same token, I couldn't begin to count the number of poems that are written about writing poetry.

Whereas philosophy for the masses used to be Herbert Spencer, now it has drifted this low:

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51ylb4-trCL._BO2,204,203,200_PIsitb-sticker-arrow-click,TopRight,35,-76_AA300_SH20_OU01_.jpg

no one is actually stopping you from reading the nicomachean ethics

no, but several people itt, including those defending what might seem like deliberate obfuscation, have implied that philosophers and theorists are all but actively trying to stop people from understanding their work.

or at least suggested that they don't see intelligibility as a virtue relative to their practice

xp

I have happily waded around in Aristotelean waters already. But are you not implying that modern philosophers have nothing left to say to anyone not fully engaged with philosophy as a full time pursuit?

By the same token, I couldn't begin to count the number of poems that are written about writing poetry.

― Aimless, Thursday, February 16, 2012 2:48 PM (23 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah, lol, i was thinking of mentioning poetry in my response to aimless. poetry has cut itself off from the world in a very similar fashion. perhaps it's a defensive response to the world cutting itself off from poetry (and philosophy), i dunno

contenderizer, i think it would be more charitable to say that for many of them, the intelligibility of their practice has become one of the painfully central issues they are concerned with.

something similar could be said about poets. in both cases it would have a lot to do with the romantic and modernist movements.

I mean this in the nicest way possible: but it would also help to maybe have a little humility and accept the possibility that you have something to learn, or at the very least they have good reasons to write the way they write, instead of presuming to tell philosophers how to do philosophy. You don't seem especially curious about this type of writing so much as you want to condemn it out of hand.

contenderizer, i think it would be more charitable to say that for many of them, the intelligibility of their practice has become one of the painfully central issues they are concerned with.

something similar could be said about poets. in both cases it would have a lot to do with the romantic and modernist movements.

― j., Thursday, February 16, 2012 3:16 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah, okay, fair enough. maybe i could say that their relationship to this issue seems not to favor clarity in writing.

just for the record i fucking hate mfa poetry, but i understand that it's written the way it is for a reason, and that that reason is not "so that i can keep making them assistant professor dollars and getting that undergrad rhetoric 101 poontang"

contenderizer: neither their relationship to the issue, nor the issue!

I mean this in the nicest way possible: but it would also help to maybe have a little humility and accept the possibility that you have something to learn, or at the very least they have good reasons to write the way they write, instead of presuming to tell philosophers how to do philosophy. You don't seem especially curious about this type of writing so much as you want to condemn it out of hand.

― ryan, Thursday, February 16, 2012 3:21 PM (57 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

well, i'm kind of hoping that someone will make a good, strong, clear case that something truly valuable is served by what might seem like mere obfuscation. or post an example of something so head-spinningly complex and novel in its conception that it simply couldn't be presented in more easily graspable terms. or really demonstrate how what seems like obscurantism actually makes a strong statement in its unintelligibility about, say, unknowability, or power dynamics, or the structure of language itself. there seem to be quite a few very knowledgeable people in this thread, and i'm open to being schooled.

contenderizer: neither their relationship to the issue, nor the issue!

― j., Thursday, February 16, 2012 3:25 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol, yeah, i get that that's the argument, i'd just like to see it unpacked a bit more thoroughly.

just for the record i fucking hate mfa poetry, but i understand that it's written the way it is for a reason, and that that reason is not "so that i can keep making them assistant professor dollars and getting that undergrad rhetoric 101 poontang"

― BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, Thursday, February 16, 2012 3:24 PM (6 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

and the reason is?

well, for me that came from something like struggling through adorno as an undergraduate (and very much disliking his views and his style), then coming back to him repeatedly years later and recognizing how much more clarity there was than i appreciated before. or slogging through my first read of heidegger's 'being and time' until i got to the point where i could appreciate the sense in his extremely alienating deformations of ordinary language, apparently past the point of justifiable choices about technical terminology, especially for his effort to try to re-frame problems about knowledge of the external world (of the kind that were stock in trade of philosophy from descartes onward) so that they became non-problems. which i imagine is why ryan appeals to humility, to letting yourself be taught something: it can take a long time and involve a transformative experience that can't be imparted really straightforwardly, even by knowledgeable people to intelligent, educated people of good will.

hoos i am curious, can you give me an example of what constitutes 'mfa poetry'? someone i know denies quite heavily that it exists as a thing, but this person is currently applying to mfa programmes and so may be biased

seen by most "philosophy professionals" as the study of philosophy itself

By the same token, I couldn't begin to count the number of poems that are written about writing poetry.

poetry has cut itself off from the world in a very similar fashion.

Much contemporary art music also, depressingly.

and the reason is?

― Little GTFO (contenderizer), Thursday, February 16, 2012 11:31 PM (7 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

they're in dialogue with the history of their forms and innovating within an existing context and tradition, like say ~butler~, which i'm pretty sure is a point i've made no less than half a dozen times now. eliot as derrida. that's not a mode i'm interested in, but it's important.

w/r/t poetry i tend to think the narrative implicitly adopted in much of this thread ("once upon a time the people who practiced this art did it with the public in mind, and this art was a better state then, and now this art has become an insular thing practiced only for ones peers, and as a consequence of this the standards in this art have dropped") is much more straightforwardly wrong

lovely post, j.

i got to the point where i could appreciate the sense in his extremely alienating deformations of ordinary language, apparently past the point of justifiable choices about technical terminology, especially for his effort to try to re-frame problems about knowledge of the external world (of the kind that were stock in trade of philosophy from descartes onward) so that they became non-problems.

yeah, this is what i sort of hoped that someone would be able to unpack and communicate to me, not just the sense that might be trapped in the apparent senselessness (cuz i can usually tease that out for myself, given a bit of work), but the sense of the apparent senselessness.

i accept that it's not something that can be easily explained in an internet conversation, though, and that just cuz i can't see it doesn't mean it isn't there. you do realize, though, that "letting yourself be taught something: it can take a long time and involve a transformative experience that can't be imparted really straightforwardly" might be described as sounding a wee bit, uh, religious. like something that happens at mindvalley.

kinda bummed that this thread has been limited to boring old philosophy. in that I think a lot of what scans as "obfuscatory" could more generally be read as "shop talk"

Whereas philosophy for the masses used to be Herbert Spencer

Herbert Spencer is dollar book Darwin!

they're in dialogue with the history of their forms and innovating within an existing context and tradition, like say ~butler~, which i'm pretty sure is a point i've made no less than half a dozen times now. eliot as derrida. that's not a mode i'm interested in, but it's important.

― BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, Thursday, February 16, 2012 3:45 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah, that makes sense. i have the sense that both poetry and philosophy have been badly deformed by the resulting hall of mirrors, but i don't know that i need to keep making that point. oops...

i think it's just a premise of liberal education.

for what it's worth, i used to think haydn and wordsworth were boring. and i think had to have 'experiences' as well as learn to understand principles and techniques in order to really learn real analysis and abstract algebra. but some things are still harder to talk about than others, absent the background experiences, the long-term effort to build up familiarity and a sense of the naturalness of what in some sense is artificial, etc.

that was re contenderizer's 'wee bit religious', by the way.

Thanks to a great 12th great English teacher, who could read verse with an unlikely blend of the casual and the sonorous, "Tintern Abbey" really came alive. For a looooong time I thought it set the standard for what I want from blank verse, especially so many modern attempts are so damn flat.

j. which field do you work in/ what do you do that embraces both wordsworth and real analysis? are you just a professional polymath or something more sinister?

but some things are still harder to talk about than others, absent the background experiences, the long-term effort to build up familiarity and a sense of the naturalness of what in some sense is artificial, etc.

― j., Thursday, February 16, 2012 5:53 PM (52 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

and this p much sums up why i don't think this is a problem endemic only to the rarified world of humanities: a paper on the subtleties of wolff-parkinson-white syndrome is going to be as impenetrable to a non-cardiologist as derrida would be to a non-theorist

nb - i haven't been keeping up with this thread, so don't hold it against me

j. which field do you work in/ what do you do that embraces both wordsworth and real analysis? are you just a professional polymath or something more sinister?

philosophy arguably does! but i wasn't always a philosopher.

ha, my money's on sinister then.

i think it's just a premise of liberal education.

― j., Thursday, February 16, 2012 3:53 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i suppose it is? i'm the product of a liberal education, but i never really had an experience like that. i enjoyed it, but don't think it changed me much (except in the general sense that everything changes us). perhaps i'm unteachable? or just too comfortably set in my assumptions to be dislodged, i dunno. fwiw, i've read a fair amount of late 20th century philosophy and critical theory, and even the stuff i like i wish were more straightforward. i respect simplicity. probably just the way god made me.

hoos i am curious, can you give me an example of what constitutes 'mfa poetry'? someone i know denies quite heavily that it exists as a thing, but this person is currently applying to mfa programmes and so may be biased

― desperado, rough rider (thomp), Thursday, February 16, 2012 11:40 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

here is one of my very favorites, by an old friend

"apothecary, in time of joy"

Give your old love letters over
to the fire. There is nothing
that can come of them now.

If you keep them, though, take the praises
and petal them together, in such a way
that I love you simply becomes you are loved,

and all the kisses you collected become
radium as the Curies knew it;
light rested in the palms,

fingertips touching,
a mystery housed
in hands.

Regard the sun as a rare thing
that has come out for you. Use
words like phoenix and resurrection, and believe them.

Be with the cherry trees in the courtyard
in spring, the Japanese Rorschach
of pink and white on the skeletons

you have been avoiding all winter.
Pick your heart out of the branches,
let it rest.

**************

The qualities I might say it shares with other "MFA style" poems is the relative delicacy of the language (not bad, just common--like if you read it aloud you would break the words), the nature metaphors (again not bad, but especially everpresent in MFA writers who so often do their writing at rural universities), nature as heritage appears so often among people who lack some other form of identity heritage. It's all very kinda modern romantic ime.

I can still recite this from memory, though, a true favorite.

J., there was something you once posted years ago about how learning calculus makes you smarter in ways that are not immediately apparent that I always thought of as kind of insightful and inspiring.

Contenderizer, really, you've never had the experience where you learn something and a bunch of other/related things start to make sense? I totally agree with j. that it's a basic purpose of education.

well, to expand the discussion away from "the_humanities" I'll point out that when I referee for particular mathematics journals, the standards I'm given are "1) is the result super important? 2) do the methods promise to be useful, even if the main results aren't especially important?" Yes to either 1) or 2) is sufficient justification for recommending publication. But neither 1) nor 2) addresses the "quality" of the writing, so that even researchers in close subareas of mathematics may not really get what new papers in mathematics are going on about, or why anyone should care. Is that obfuscation? To me, to understand a piece of writing, I need to know where it's coming from, what its motivation is, & so I'd say that research articles in contemporary mathematics are generally obfuscated.

a paper on the subtleties of wolff-parkinson-white syndrome is going to be as impenetrable to a non-cardiologist as derrida would be to a non-theorist

― i love pinfold cricket (gbx), Thursday, February 16, 2012 3:57 PM (6 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

we talked about this before, and i just don't think it's true. the technical impenetrability of medical, mathematical, engineering, physics (etc.) texts strikes me as different in kind from the structural impenetrability of theoretical texts. i mean, i think derrida is difficult even for theorists, at least where extracting "the meaning" from the text is concerned (acknowledging that that's often a big part of the point).

a cardiologist who produced a paper that other cardiologists had to struggle to understand and couldn't agree on the meaning of would probably not get published.

oh, you dont think its true. well nm then.

xps big time. my roommate is doing surgical research and the head of his lab is known for needlessly dense writing. he's tasked with cleaning it up (and I've been curbsided for copy editing advice), and even there's a only so much you can do: the endless qualifiers needed for "rigor" really puts a strain on clarity

Contenderizer, really, you've never had the experience where you learn something and a bunch of other/related things start to make sense? I totally agree with j. that it's a basic purpose of education.

― EveningStar (Sund4r), Thursday, February 16, 2012 4:07 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah, i've definitely learned things and learned to understand things, but never something that seemed as though it might be incommunicable, something "transformative" in a quasi-spiritual sense. like, i've read enough philosophy and theory to become more familiar with the language. this does make it easier to understand. i imagine that if i studied the discipline, i would become familiar enough with its history and thought-culture to easily understand stuff that i currently have to struggle with. but i suspect that i would always regard what i now see as mere obfuscation as mere obfuscation. i've never had an experience that turned what seemed like bad communication into good. maybe as a kid, when first encountering art that didn't fit my preconceptions, but not since.

that was to Euler btw

figured

oh, you dont think its true. well nm then.

― max, Thursday, February 16, 2012 4:16 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

wtf, max? i explained the "why" behind that pretty clearly.

once I went to a math conference based on new problems in the area. one night a few people, the most active senior researchers in the area, got together after dinner to listen to an informal talk by another senior researcher who'd claimed a solution to a huge open problem, but no one could understand the manuscript that had circulated. After four+ hours of his talk that night, which was dramatic & included lots of heated questions from the audience, the consensus was that the proof couldn't be made sensical, & the paper (which several in the audience were at the time refereeing) was rejected. He's since withdrawn his claim that the result was proved. So in mathematics, obfuscation can conceal errors, or even just conceal whether what was claimed to have been done, was really done.

This kind of thing isn't uncommon, either. It doesn't always end in flames: for instance the community ultimately could vouch for Perelman's proof of the Poincaré conjecture.

a cardiologist who produced a paper that other cardiologists had to struggle to understand and couldn't agree on the meaning of would probably not get published.

― Little GTFO (contenderizer), Thursday, February 16, 2012 6:12 PM (7 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

well sorta. this all seems to hinge on the word "meaning" (ha): the abstract of a paper will usually, in the conclusion, give the most concise and intelligible expression of the "meaning" of the paper (which is why sooooooo many ppl in technical fields just read abstracts when no one is looking). which is not entirely dissimilar to what dust jackets and lit theory profs do with the meaning of esoteric philosophical pieces.

we're talking at cross purposes, in all honesty---i've taken "academic writing is obfuscatory" to mean that "it's trafficking in vocab and conceptual ideas that are generally shared by the intended audience, so scans as nonsense if you're not in the club." whereas i guess your take is "the language of 'theorists,' broadly conceived, is obfuscatory---maybe even cynically---by design, and is not at all necessary to the purported work being undertaken."

I agree that a reviewer's evaluation of a mathematics or science article is generally (and should be!) independent of how well written it is. On the other hand, in my experience a well-written paper will tend to be reviewed more favourably. One reason is that part of good writing is framing your argument so the reader/reviewer has a clear idea of the works usefulness/importance. As soon as the reviewer has to work hard to decipher what is going on and what the point is (not uncommon, at least for papers I review), you're probably in trouble.

Back to (Continental) philosophy: isn't one premise of the discussion here that unlike other areas, clarity of writing is not orthogonal to the content of the work?

yeah, i've definitely learned things and learned to understand things, but never something that seemed as though it might be incommunicable, something "transformative" in a quasi-spiritual sense. like, i've read enough philosophy and theory to become more familiar with the language. this does make it easier to understand. i imagine that if i studied the discipline, i would become familiar enough with its history and thought-culture to easily understand stuff that i currently have to struggle with. but i suspect that i would always regard what i now see as mere obfuscation as mere obfuscation. i've never had an experience that turned what seemed like bad communication into good. maybe as a kid, when first encountering art that didn't fit my preconceptions, but not since.

well, 'incommunicable...' is ramping up the stakes of what i originally said, a bit. personally my view is that these hard-to-grasp, hard-to-communicate aspects of the kind of work we're talking about are embodied in the literary or rhetorical or (in the apt word you just used to talk about the difference between these texts and scientific articles) structural features of the actual written works, as pieces of writing. so the difficulty in talking about them is on a par with the difficulty in talking about, say, 'ulysses' or 'paterson' or 'the making of americans' or whatever.

well, i'm kind of hoping that someone will make a good, strong, clear case that something truly valuable is served by what might seem like mere obfuscation. or post an example of something so head-spinningly complex and novel in its conception that it simply couldn't be presented in more easily graspable terms. or really demonstrate how what seems like obscurantism actually makes a strong statement in its unintelligibility about, say, unknowability, or power dynamics, or the structure of language itself. there seem to be quite a few very knowledgeable people in this thread, and i'm open to being schooled.

― Little GTFO (contenderizer), Thursday, February 16, 2012 6:29 PM (56 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

dog just give up. no one is going to make a case for you about this stuff on your terms or on your territory. people have made plenty of cases to you, theyve even provided against their better judgments examples for you, and you clearly have no desire to "be schooled" or even give up an inch. i mean it seems clear to me that you understand what the argument on the other side is! thats kind of the best thats going to happen. you understand the argument and you remain unconvinced. i dont think anyone is going to convince you. you seem like a dude who is pretty sure of himself. ppl are being really patient with you but jeez you are flogging a dead horse at this point.

I've only been reading this thread and not posting, but this phrase: "what might seem like mere obfuscation" is driving me bonkers! "what might seem like?????"

euler, have you ever run across saul stahl?

http://www.math.ku.edu/~stahl/

i never really learned geometry in college and since then i've been dismayed to find that mathematicians took the hilbert-style recension of geometry and ran with it, which is kind of a bummer when you want to teach yourself modern geometry to better understand shit that philosophers say about geometry pre-hilbert.

i kind of suspect that math and science educators are the people most genuinely concerned with improving on the clarity of their presentations of their knowledge, out of anyone in academia.

i dont think anyone is going to convince you. you seem like a dude who is pretty sure of himself. ppl are being really patient with you but jeez you are flogging a dead horse at this point.

i'm kind of winding down on this, max, so no worries. i give. more than anything else, this thread has made me want to go read a bunch of philosophy and theory.

or else complain about how the culture of "serious" art criticism is killing art. that would be fun, right?

huh, J, no, but he sounds pretty interesting!

you should take my course this term! I've been lecturing on geometry pre-Hilbert, & how philosophers (mis-)understood it, for the last three weeks!

There are great texts for learning classical geometry, though; have a look at Hartshorne's relatively recent Geometry: Euclid and Beyond. Hartshorne is a canonical contemporary algebraic geometer, but he wanted a text he could use for teaching elementary geometry, failed to find one good enough for his needs, & wrote it. It's terrific.

I like Greenberg's book too (Euclidean & Non-Euclidean Geometries); it has a bit less nouveau flair than Hartshorne, & it seems to be philosophically adept but it's pretty fast & loose with those things; still it's a good launching pad for understanding e.g. the independence of the parallel postulate.

thanks, i'll have to take a look at those when i get a free summer.

philosophically naive presentations might not be so bad. i'm really more interested in getting a handle on the potential for philosophical formalization that apparently comes along with geometry from the start, even pre-euclid. when i was a mathematician i never, ever had the kinds of 'intuitions' about our results that philosophers love to trot out when they want to motivate their own questions.

well then, given the things you've been saying here, you might enjoy Reviel Netz's The Shaping of Deduction in Greek Mathematics: A Study in Cognitive History.

digging this reading list!

actually the more i think/write about this the more i realize that some kind of education in the histories and concepts is sort of "essential" to my enjoyment? a lot of what i get out of reading say derrida or butler is picking out the patterns and games theyre playing, patterns & games that stretch back across a lot of work

― max, Thursday, February 16, 2012 5:03 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark

When evening comes, I return home and enter my study; on the threshold I take off my workday clothes, covered with mud and dirt, and put on the garments of court and palace. Fitted out appropriately, I step inside the venerable courts of the ancients, where, solicitously received by them, I nourish myself on that food that alone is mine and for which I was born; where I am unashamed to converse with them and to question them about the motives for their actions, and they, out of their human kindness, answer me. And for four hours at a time I feel no boredom, I forget all my troubles, I do not dread poverty, and I am not terrified by death. I absorb myself into them completely.

euler: wow! that looks awesome. is there any connection to jacob klein's stuff on geometry? i read that a long time ago and vaguely recall a similar-sounding emphasis on the use of letters.

or else complain about how the culture of "serious" art criticism is killing art. that would be fun, right?

I'm surprised a thread like this hasn't popped up yet. art world is the one thing that seems to me *as* insular wrt language tropes memes etc. as the academic world.

xxxpost

with the addition of multimillionaires paying for its products

also now that I think about it, you might also enjoy an old classic: Jacob Klein's Greek Mathematical Thought & The Origin of Algebra. Klein was a study of Husserl & taught at St. John's, but he thought super hard about geometry & algebra, & wrote this classic book. Highly recommended to stoners & lovers of theory, but it's a book that can cross the aisles b/w "continental" & "analytic" philosophy, while saying a bunch of fascinating (& maybe even correct) things about ancient mathematics & the algebraic turn in the seventeenth century.

er, should say, "student of Husserl"

Klein was a study of Husserl & taught at St. John's, but he thought super hard about geometry & algebra, & wrote this classic book.

the 'but' in this sentence is doing a hilarious job.

i've never gotten high in my life but 'recommended to stoners & lovers of theory' sounds reminiscent of my experience of that book.

sorry, just instinct. Husserl was a p serious guy mathematically too. actually lots of French theory guys are at least well acquainted with math, so I shouldn't be so harsh.

/or else complain about how the culture of "serious" art criticism is killing art. that would be fun, right?/

I'm surprised a thread like this hasn't popped up yet. art world is the one thing that seems to me *as* insular wrt language tropes memes etc. as the academic world.

xxxpost

Not drag ILPs mascot into this but the reason I love szarkowski is that he is so clear

wrt to the nussbaum text i think the most spurious claim or, well, maybe spurious isn't the word i'm looking for, is this how she talks about butler's use of a diverse range of different writers. not really using stuff that is supposed to be grouped together. this hodgepodge. she declares this as being in itself obfuscatory, a distorting lens that mangles everything she uses into the shape of the point she is forcing. but i mean. gender trouble is a highly foucauldian text. and butler is a fantastic interpreter of foucault. something she has continually grappled with. (some of her most beautiful and insightful writing is from "giving an account of oneself" where she talks about very late foucault. a really subtle piece of writing. ) but this is a tactic of foucault and a lot of writers who take him on board. i think a really good example is from an essay by tania murray li, where she uses this hodgepodge of foucault and gramsci, here it is about the inconsistencies between these descriptions, the tensions that these assemblages produce. this is a fairly common strategy but nussbaum presents it like it was a thoughtless oversight. and she says it so definitively it works as a mask. this unwavering clarity. i think writing should produce gaps and spaces. should reflect the disconnections, tensions and inconsistencies of its subject matter. philosophical writing is not necessarily about condensing and contracting. i think this requires less excuses about who the audience is or what the ambitions of the writer are, although these are also relevant, but what is most important i think is how writing will always perform meaning as well. writing that is not about closure but opening up. moving beyond a recognisable formulations of truth-production.

love szarkowski's clearness yes, but as I think people have sympathized, Barthes's dense ridiculousness is pretty fun too

i always thought barthes was like incredibly clear. barthes is so poetic and beautiful too.

this is a favourite barthes line:

"In his own particular way, Twombly tells us that the essence of writing is neither form nor usage but simply gesture - the gesture that produces it by allowing it to happen: a garble, almost a smudge, a negligence. We can reason this out through a comparison. What would be the essence of a pair of trousers (if it has one)? Certainly not that carefully prepared and rectilinear object found on the racks of department stores; rather the ball of cloth dropped on the floor by the negligent hand of a young boy when he undresses tired, lazy and indifferent. The essence of an object has something to do with the way it turns into trash. It is not necessarily what remains after the object has been used, it’s rather what is thrown away in use. And so it is with Twombly’s writings. They are the fragments of an indolence, and this makes them extremely elegant; it’s as though the only thing left after the strongly erotic act of writing were the languid fatigue of love: a garment cast aside into a corner of the page.”

about cy twombly

judith fwiw i think you are p claro

i think writing should produce gaps and spaces. should reflect the disconnections, tensions and inconsistencies of its subject matter.

This is an interesting aesthetic theory. The first consequence I can derive from it is that it more or less demands a lack of fluency in one's use of language. But there is more than one way to skin a cat. What you seem to be describing is a sort of mimetic approach to the subject matter. This approach is familiar to me through poetry and at times it can achieve some subtle and wonderful effects, but any effort to apply it as a universal theory of writing is mostly going to result in some very ugly and awful constructions, imo.

i didn't say anything about a universal theory of writing. isn't the insistence on clarity or w/e a more universalist demand?

i said that these strategies are valid.

HUSSERL SWEATSHIRT

I think I have to confess I haven't read Barthes in a while now, and remembered it as being dense but fun. I need to open it up again. Making statements from memory might not be the best idea for me!

well i don't know. i've mostly read barthes high and it made total sense to me high. i've wasted my life.

mostly what I remember is that he had *opinions* that were as energizing to disagree with as to agree with.
the art world speak that I'm thinking of most is what I've seen pop up around the conceptual art world. much of which I like, but I can see how it can be alienating to a lot of people. and have seen it alienate many people! it really does kind of demand that you have been keeping up with the discourse as it's unfolded for a few decades. but I think I'm going to get out of my depth in two seconds. this is when I would call out to my girlfriend for assistance.

haha I'm making a poll about contemporary art next

I plan on voting in favor.

can you stop making threads about things i'm gonna get sucked into please. i'm really trying to be on the internet way less.

i didn't say anything about a universal theory of writing.

Sorry for the misunderstanding. When I see a sentence that begins "I think writing should..." (be like this), then I expect that what follows is a prescription about writing generally. I didn't mentally insert a qualifier, as in "some writing". I see now I should have.

the moment for this has passed, but since judith went back to nussbaum, can i just:

Nor is Butler's treatment of Austin very plausible. She makes the bizarre claim
that the fact that the marriage ceremony is one of dozens of examples of performatives in
Austin's text suggests "that the heterosexualization of the social bond is the paradigmatic form
for those speech acts which bring about what they name." Hardly. Marriage is no more
paradigmatic for Austin than betting or ship-naming or promising or apologizing. He is
interested in a formal feature of certain utterances, and we are given no reason to suppose that
their content has any significance for his argument. It is usually a mistake to read earthshaking significance into a philosopher's pedestrian choice of examples. Should we say that
Aristotle's use of a low-fat diet to illustrate the practical syllogism suggests that chicken is at
the heart of Aristotelian virtue? Or that Rawls's use of travel plans to illustrate practical
reasoning shows that A Theory of Justice aims at giving us all a vacation?

i don't know what butler is doing here at the point nussbaum is picking on, but it is face-palmingly rong to snipe at someone for reading significance into austin's examples when austin made his philosophical career on cautioning us about the importance of the examples we choose. especially because they tend to give rise to spurious theories and generate interminable academic discussions when we ignore the way words are really used and focus on a limited set of them to the neglect of the words we actually live and do things with.

which i think speaks to the value of 'hodgepodge' that you mentioned, judith.

well i don't know. i've mostly read barthes high and it made total sense to me high. i've wasted my life.

sub all theory for Barthes and u r otm

err j. the butler and post-butler abuse of the performative is pretty egregious iirc

i think that is likely. but if that's the problem then make that be the problem, don't play games with cultural capital and try to scold your targets publicly as if they were clueless undergraduates.

this week i read a bunch of this ('the promise of happiness', by sara ahmed) -- which is a far better example of bad academic writing than anything here so far, i think -- and there's a couple pages that take austin's use of 'happy' and 'felicitous' for successful perfomatives as if he meant 'tending to make people happy'

xp -- i'm not really sure what "making that be the problem" would look like ?

unless it's this by j. culler - http://poeticstoday.dukejournals.org/content/21/3/503.short -

The notion of the performative—an utterance that accomplishes the act that it designates—was proposed by the philosopher J. L. Austin to describe a type of utterance neglected by philosophers. This article follows the vicissitudes of the concept in literary and cultural theory to show (1) why it appeared useful for literary theory and what happens when literature is construed as fundamentally performative; (2) how it functions in theory and criticism associated with deconstruction, and (3) what role it plays in recent work in gender studies and queer theory, where Judith Butler has developed a performative theory of gender. The shifts in this concept pose questions about how to think about the constitutive force of language, the nature of discursive events, and literature as an act.

i don't know, i probably have a phase to grow out of: one of finding even-handedness less interesting than 'going in', as someone put it

that sounds awful.

i don't know, tom, but i suspect it would look less like a takedown book review in a friendly venue.

the other thing, i mean. i've never read culler carefully enough to be sure what i think of him but he certainly is not awful.

i was going to say, i wouldn't go that far ...

looking at the culler again i'm wondering if i've got my idea that butler gets austin wrong from reading people who get butler's use of austin wrong, maybe in the holidays i will finally get around to reading 'bodies that matter' and 'gender trouble'

i can't read through this whole thread, sorry.

but, my $0.02.

the 'Impenetrability' of much academic prose is, i think, due to two things:

1) it is symptomatic of confused and convoluted thinking, which is endemic in academia. why? because such thinking has decided advantages in this field. as others have pointed out, not making clear, refutable claims is a not-bad way of insulating yourself from real criticism. obscurity also helps to establish a brand; it can make you appear sage-like and forbiddingly smart and can establish a mystique. i'm not saying that all scholars are that cynical--though some (like zizek) are. i think it's more a matter of it being convenient.

2) i do think that sometimes folks can sort of "smudge" parts of their argument because they aren't too sure of that argument themselves. rather than explain what they're unsure of, or acknowledge the tangles they have gotten themselves into, they produce a tangle of verbiage that seeks to obscure the weaknesses in their logic. i know that this happens because i think i've done it, or been tempted to it, a bit myself. luckily i was trained by folks who will call bullshit on me. other folks aren't so lucky. i've seen young scholars/grad students wander into conference presentations that make no sense and for which they've been ripped to shreads -- largely because they submitted the same argument as an essay to a professor who was too lazy to point out where the argument didn't make sense (or in some cases where the "argument" was just a deeply confused jumble of borrowed concepts and groundless, murky assertions).

of course, sometimes things are obscure because they are genuinely complex and difficult, or because the writer hasn't figured out the most effective way of explaining themselves. in other words, sometimes--often--it's worthwhile to push your way past some of what seem like hopelessly obscure prose to find some useful and interesting ideas. that said, i'm still usually left wondering why they couldn't have tried to explain themselves more clearly and simply.

often when i talk with folks who write seemingly obscurantist, incoherent prose i quickly realize they just don't think clearly. they don't think through the logics of what they are saying.

I think zizek is very cynical, sure, but, if you will, in a "performative" way (sorry). Beyond that though, he's actually a very straightforward and accessible read, especially when compared to lacan. And as I recall there are a fair number of more straightforward lacanians who will attack him precisely for presenting what they'd call an accessible but neutered pop-psych or whatever gloss on lacan. Zizek isn't even particularly allusion- or theorist- dense. He's just digressive.

right

his books are like enormous collections of 4 page essays

yeah, zizek isn't necessarily as dense with allusions to other writers, etc. as other folks, but he certainly has written a great many articles and books whose argument is all but impossible to parse or render intelligible. i mean you can sometimes map them out, they may have a discernable internal logic, but one that collapses the minute it touches anything outside of itself.

actually his great talent seems to be to make statements or "arguments" that are so blatantly self-contradictory that one has to assume that, as you suggest, it's some kind of performance.

anyway, zizek is useless, so i sort of regret even invoking his name.

this is probably not the place to get into this, but i'm convinced that lacan's writing was, to some extent anyway, a dadaist prank.

btw the thing is i couldn't give a shit about any of these folks. sterling, you have always seemed more convinced than myself that a lot of the more abstruse writing along the post-structuralist/post-modernist axis of cultural theory has real value.

i should have added one point to my earlier post:

3) i think often obscure language and overcomplicated syntax is used to convince the reader (and the author him/herself!) that banal ideas are actually quite novel and complex. often when you boil down the intelligible parts of a jameson essay, it's frightening banal and boring stuff. a lot of writing in the humanities is just about finding ways to state the obvious in 100,000 words. which makes sense, given that nowadays to get tenure you have to publish, publish, publish. so there's a premium on underthought, overwritten prose.

...which is why it's especially disheartening when laypeople (=people not angling for academic job) end up talking and writing in the same sort of hopeless tangles as a junior professor english. it's like -- you have no need to write this way, why don't you just take a moment, figure out what you're trying to say, and present it as clearly and pithily as possible?

not that this excuses academics, it's just that it's depressing when that kind of writing becomes a model outside of the context that gives it its dubious "value"

i'm convinced that lacan's writing was, to some extent anyway, a dadaist prank.

― flesh, the devil, and a wolf (wolf) (amateurist), Friday, February 17, 2012 6:12 AM (57 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

ftr you are not the first to think this

otm

Wasn't psychoanalysis just a perspicuous representation of hte subconscious anyway?

Like, a lamer one than Freud's or something.

hi

3) i think often obscure language and overcomplicated syntax is used to convince the reader (and the author him/herself!) that banal ideas are actually quite novel and complex.

yes! this is something i got out of the serres extract upthread but also something that recurred quite a lot when i tried to delve into other thinkers (lacan).

the moment i saw any footage of zizek speaking i think i went from 'man, he's trying real hard to be offputtingly smart and make his arguments impossible to follow from a to b' to 'okay he is probably just wired funny'

zizek comes across as a surprisingly endearing eccentric irl

apart from if you have to sit opposite him at a meal b/c apparently he sprays food a bit when he eats :(

he also sweats through his shirts

also like, is that really what's happening, that they're having niche discussions about things only they care about? i suspect they're writing about things a lot of people would or do care about, and they shouldn't make their discussion so exclusive

― flopson, Thursday, February 16, 2012 6:19 AM (13 hours ago)

so educated, I can go out and discuss shit,
bringin back matters to the public, I like... I love it

RE: convoluted prose: I know a lot of this has been said upthread but, remember that academics are also trying to TEACH; and if they are Marxist or otherwise 'anti-establishment', this may involve a sort of conjurer's trick whereby the reader's attention is directed to a particular problem or puzzling phenomenon, led thru the various levels of ready-made ideological explanation, then steered towards an unexpected 'short-circuit' solution — IIRC Jameson's "Brick and Balloon" is an excellent example of this, as is Susan Buck-Morss's stuff on Hegel and Haiti

in other words: the essay form has conventions of its own (and I ain't talkin "topic sentence/supporting evidence/concluding paragraph"), make sure yr up on them before you start hating

i can't parse that at all. you are arguing that "convoluted" prose has pedagogic value? can you explain that a bit more patiently?

I am interested in this too, because I did a quick google of "essay conventions" and got back results telling me how insert quotations and that narrative essays should have a point of view

I would also say that most academics, while highly educated in their specific topic(s) and quite able to impart knowledge of it, are not amazingly clever writers so they should probably stop trying to be.

when you're writing about the same things as, say, Derrida or Deleuze, then (especially if you are still finding your way as a writer) it's almost inevitable that their "style" of talking about it will rub off (hell this is part of their point, that the way of talking about something can't be divorced from the thing itself). if you read someone and think about them a lot, you're gonna consciously and unconsciously mimic their style, like the way your accent will change after living in a place long enough.

take something like the "listing" that happens in a lot of post-structuralist writings. there's actually a good reason for why that happens, and i imagine whoever started it did it for a very specific reason. at this point it's a "convention," for better or worse, for that kind of writing.

so, yeah, that's a (understandable) problem for many academics, especially ones starting out. I think doing that kind of mimicry, however, is how we learn to write better! so i dont exactly discourage it.

I like your post, amateurist. I agree with you about nearly all of it, although I'll contend that only part of the reason for vague, blurry writing is 'smudge ' and a lot of it is, as ryan says, a deliberate but unskilled grasping on the coattails of extant/established style conventions. Ken Macrorie called this 'engfish,' and it's something any teacher of writing sees frequently: the subsuming of personal voice into the Official Academic Style, poorly and ineffectively.

i gotta say i don't think mimicking deleuze is a good way for anyone to learn to write better. on the contrary.

xpost

so, there was some talk about "representational" and "non-representational" philosophy upthread, and i've been chewing that over. and i've thinking abt derrida and barthes, and trying to read deleuze & guattari. we generally conceive of philosophy as thought about (i.e., thought about things). it's commonly thought that, historically, philosophical writing was in turn conceived as the objective description and summary of logically rigorous thought about things.

i don't believe that this is true of philosophical and theoretical writing anymore, if indeed it ever really was. the primary function of philosophical writing is no longer seen as the communication of philosophical conclusions and the logical structures that generated them, but rather as the creation of a portrait of human thought. more specifically, philosophical/theoretical writers attempt to paint literary portraits of "interesting" or otherwise compelling thought processes. this makes perfect sense. it's not a break with philosophical tradition (as i suggested upthread), but rather a natural shift of focus from the ostensible goals of philosophical thought and writing to an interest in the formal qualities of these things. it was, of course, the interesting thought processes and writing styles of canonical philosophers, and not just their matter-of-fact logic and conclusions, that caused people to want to read and study them in the first place...

this makes sense of the representational/non-representational metaphor, but also shows the ways in which it falls short of describing the difference in question. philosophy is still representational, perhaps more representational than ever, but in the same way that abstraction shifted painting's focus from the secondhand "subject" to the formal qualities of paint and painting themselves, philosophy is now at least as interested in "thought for thought's sake" as in whatever a thinker might be trying to "say". what's funny about this insight is that it's exactly the sort of "a-ha!" moment i denied upthread that i ever have anymore. then again, it's not really a particularly novel insight, rather something i learn and unlearn repeatedly throughout my life in different contexts.

fwiw, none of this really excuses deliberate obfuscation for ego's sake, something that seems to be built into contemporary philosophical aesthetics, but it does give me a way to begin accepting that "philosophical aesthetics" might be a valid concept (taste in brains, if you will) and that such aesthetics, once developed, might even be sufficiently interesting in themselves to justify incomprehensibility as a byproduct.

^ maybe this kind of writing/approach to writing isn't anywhere near so prevalent as i suggest (maybe it's now become unfashionable, i dunno), but the development on a certain philosophical aesthetic does seem to underpin a lot of what i was objecting to upthread

mimicking difficult things poorly can be a perfectly useful phase on the path to an eventually utterly different style. anxiety of influence blahblahblah.

sterling is the a goal an "utterly different style" or is the goal "write clearly"? because if it's the latter then there are models that'll help you a lot more than poor gilles deleuze.

contenderizer, i don't want to say there's nothing to that (and it certainly fits very 'rigorous', non-'literary' examples too, like david lewis proposing to 'see what follows from what' without any concern for justifying his premises). but i would want to stress that i think two major components of the literary/rhetorical turn tradition-wide since about 1800 involve (1) changing conceptions about the difficulty of self-knowledge, and (2) changing conceptions of the problems facing philosophy that looks to fulfill its (socially) liberatory potential. (both bear awful heavily on the conception of the reader that some authors find themselves driven to adopt.) i don't think that some of the people you've been talking about are neglectful of the perennial human interests in the results or effects of philosophy.

i think that applies pretty well to deleuze and guattari, given their attempt to reconcile psychoanalysis and marxism. plus they have an extremely counter-mundane conception of 'reality' (which is a concern of deleuze's that makes him very classical), which naturally gives rise to terminological/lexical innovation.

an utterly different style than that being initially mimicked that is, not "an utterly different style" than anything on the planet. said different style being, perhaps, a very clear one. I'm just saying that when people are learning to write, they try all sort of suits on, and where they end up holds the traces of where they've been but not usually in a direct way, and sometimes in a very opposite way.

but that's as true of bad, unclear writing as it is of good, clear writing. so what's your point?

i dropped out of this thread a while ago but read some of it & just want to say j. and ryan's posts arguing the opposite pov i was are really good and have made me think & wonder. & also that contenderizer's obduracy in the argument is an interesting accidental illustration of their points about language & stuff

(1) changing conceptions about the difficulty of self-knowledge, and (2) changing conceptions of the problems facing philosophy that looks to fulfill its (socially) liberatory potential.

oh yeah, definitely. i was leaving a lot of stuff off the table in order to focus more clearly on the idea of an aesthetics. i wasn't, for instance, worrying at all about the things that might have motivated the development of a particular aesthetic, or about how an interest in the formal qualities of thought can coexist with an interest in the arguments developed within thought, how these concerns reflect back and forth off one another. honestly, marxist and post-marxist philosophy's "orthodoxy of thought" (my personal bugbear) as regards "liberatory potential" annoys me at least as much as the purple prose and intellectual conceit, but i'll save that for another thread.

amateurist: my point is just that trying out lots of styles, including styles we'd later consider poor, and trying on styles poorly, is typically in the long run better than not trying on styles. it's better to go through an awkward phase (or many awkward phases) than not develop at all.

yeah but some styles might be better to imitate than others.

i just keep thinking about how jargony the language of ilx can be, inserting all these references to its history, interfaces, etc. poxy fule, remove bookmark from thread, 51. western philosophy is a tradition spanning millennia, ilx is a ten year old message board. just saying.

"The safest general characterization of ILX is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Ned Raggett."

well there's a difference between in-jokes and jargon, but in any case, they both inevitably create in-groups and out-groups. you can argue about how intentional that is - technical words can be a useful tool, isolating yourself from other groups of people can also be a useful tool.

i mean, lets not overstate the comparison but it does give some perspective.

right but within that comparison you can see some link between 77er or noize dudes who have their own vocab - and the social games that are being played - and someone in some sub-discipline who uses the sub-discipline's vocab as a way to isolate themselves from others, rather than out of necessity

way to not overstate the comparison!

Um, how did this conversation last two days before mentioning Alan Sokal's Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity and the Sokal affair.

it's been mentioned twice

http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/transgress_v2/transgress_v2_singlefile.html

― kinder, Wednesday, February 15, 2012 10:08 PM (2 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

No-one else wants to mention http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair ?

― kinder, Wednesday, February 15, 2012 10:18 PM (2 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

predominant moral to take from the sokal affair is that sokal's a dick, rly.

― Merdeyeux, Wednesday, February 15, 2012 10:21 PM (2 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

ftr i don't think "is the language obfuscated" is a question that was ever really disagreed upon in that other thread

― BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, Wednesday, February 15, 2012 8:38 PM (37 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

what thread was this?

xps oh great the sokal hoax came up

― Critique of Pure Moods (goole), Wednesday, February 15, 2012 10:23 PM (2 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol

but i think its something we all want to talk about, probably. i know horseshoe would probably love to discuss the sokal affair, at length.

fuck that dude imo

yeah, fuck that dude

i had never heard of this. i bet he's fun at parties.

Oh god that guy is such a douche.

he's a hardline "soft sciences aren't real" guy.

Oops, I think I errantly searched for sokol rather than sokal. Not about to dredge that discussion up again.

I will note that peer reviewed science articles in English have improved markedly in the past 2 decades. There are fewer convoluted constructions solely to avoid the first person, and a bit more natural tone. The jargon is still there, but the language around the technical terms is clear.

let's just face it, language and in particular the english language sucks

btw I have a solution to solve all this existential dread - in 1000 years humanity will be a hive mind connected to one single queen beeman, language will be unnecessary, we will all act in unison

banaka got there first

with a clean, minty-fresh blast

We all know the singularity will solve all our problems; the only reason I post to ILX is it will probably help the singularity come about faster. This is also the reason I own a Roomba (see Feb. 13, 2012 entry of "This Day in the Apocalypse" in John Hodgman's That Is All).

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

thank god that's settled

gf has to read a paul de man book right now for class and was reading passages outloud while the poll results came in

paul de man turned out to be a secret nazi iirc

ya he sounds like one

de man is actually one of the clearer post-structuralists

paul da MAN!

The discovery of de Man's wartime writing made the front page of the New York Times,[15] and angry debate followed. Jeffrey Mehlman, a professor of French at Boston University, declared there were “grounds for viewing the whole of deconstruction as a vast amnesty project for the politics of collaboration during World War II”,[16]

Richard J. Evans, in his book "In Defence of History", states that the defence of De Man by other relativists and postmodernists went too far. According to him, the defenders used deconstruction to argue away his collaboration.[19]

de man also oversaw spivak's dissertation

spivak is so on board with de man. i read this interview where she was frothing all over him.

ew

there's a funny moment in the movie 'the ister' -- there are interviews with a few french philosophers who work on heidegger. i think it's jean-luc nancy who gets asked about heidegger's nazism. and he sort of tries to explain it in terms of the german enlightenment, and then he just kind of stops and is like 'idk, a lot of us were stalinists or maoists at one time, what do you do'

pretend that time never happened, duh

i tried to watch the ister once but that motherfucker is like 5 hours long!

there was a cute ron rosenbaum article a few months back where he declared that hannah arendt was worthless because she had an affair with heidegger and heidegger was a nazi

you have to do it in shifts

de man also oversaw spivak's dissertation

did not know this

der ister sounds either amazing or the worst thing ever. i had to read something else of heidegger's on holderlin's recently and it was just, i don't know, it was something all right

There shd probably be a whole 'nother thread about kneejerk hatred of dense prose (and maybe a counter-kneejerk respect for dense prose?) but that's a bunfight I cd stand to avoid this week.

― Death to False Meta (Noodle Vague), Tuesday, 10 November 2009 14:13 (2 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

paul da MAN!

― Exile in lolville (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, 20 February 2012 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

In more ways than you can imagine

Much of the academic worship of de Man resulted from the fact that he was, in the most precise sense of the word, a mind-fucker.

I knew many of his victims among the female graduate students at Yale. De Man seduced their psyches with a tenacity more rapacious than any his less imaginative colleagues used in trying to possess their bodies. When he told the women in his seminar they would not make the ‘bourgeois errors’ about literature that were made in every other seminar, he thrilled them with the promise of escape from their conventional families. When they felt terrified by their ignorance of psychology, history and ethics, he flattered them with proofs that all those terms were hollow and that their ignorance was the source of their greatest intellectual strength. He flattered their sense of uniqueness by publicly discouraging his most obviously foolish acolytes, and, unlike vulgar physical seducers, he apparently asked for absolutely nothing in return for the vertiginous thrills he provided. What some of his victims still don’t understand is that what they gave was precisely the exoneration that he needed most desperately, because every mind that he seduced to his own emptiness was a mind that had thrown away the instruments by which he might be judged.

When he told the women in his seminar they would not make the ‘bourgeois errors’ about literature that were made in every other seminar

wait, were only women in his seminars? did he only say this to female students? i refuse to read more about this and find out btw.

also i find whoever wrote that quotation...suspect

"he apparently asked for absolutely nothing in return for the vertiginous thrills he provided"

if you're someone's professor it doesn't really work that way.

xpost uh huh

Oh yeah its a crazy letter, posted it for a laugh..

victoria richardson

lol max you will like this

http://retractionwatch.wordpress.com/2013/02/22/way-out-there-paper-claiming-to-merge-physics-and-biology-retracted/