academic language is often purposely obfuscated

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!'