academic language is often purposely obfuscated

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.