academic language is often purposely obfuscated

"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"