academic language is often purposely obfuscated

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