academic language is often purposely obfuscated

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.