'Rediculous' Customer & Critic Reviews

[Jean-Luc Garbo]

I've enjoyed a friend's recent comment on the matter: "I am of the perspective that theory should live outside of the academy, and that extensive uses of jargon can be alienating, almost esoteric because they sometimes require readers or listeners to have access to certain bodies of work (that they might not have) to understand the arguments being made."

[Sloper]

In the last few years, the notion of 'impact on a non-academic audience' has become an important criterion for researchers, at least in my field (English). It's problematic, and applied problematically, but at heart - I almost said 'in theory' - I think it's a good thing.

Of course complex ideas need to be expressed in complex terms, but it seems to me that many scholars are motivated by a desire to mystify the (often banal or tenuous) content of their work. If the jargon is being used with real conviction then it isn't jargon, and is worth the reader's time and effort; but it's often used to give a trendy, 'radical' veneer to the arguments of time-pleasing, back-slapping navel-gazers.

I often waste valuable time (I'm doing it now, for instance) feeling miserable about the fact that so much of my life as a researcher has to be spent reading the work of critics - leading scholars in the field of medievalism - who display no appreciation or understanding of the magnificent works of art they're discussing, but who are nonetheless regarded as authorities, and who may well be reviewing (and rejecting) my articles. The damn thing is they all seem to be good friends with each other.

I may be biased because the lack of publications on my CV is making it hard for me to get a job, but I do think that methods and terms ostensibly designed to broaden discussions, to open scholarship to new and radical ideas, have in practice become dogmatic and limiting, to the point where it's almost impossible to challenge these new orthodoxies.

It's called higher education for a reason, and academic scholarship should be sophisticated, complex and at times challenging, but it should be so because it's dealing with sophisticated, complex and challenging texts or concepts, not because the scholar in question is trying to make their writing look academic.

Sorry for the rant, but at least it's appropriate to the thread...

[Mr Sausage]

I've enjoyed a friend's recent comment on the matter: "I am of the perspective that theory should live outside of the academy, and that extensive uses of jargon can be alienating, almost esoteric because they sometimes require readers or listeners to have access to certain bodies of work (that they might not have) to understand the arguments being made."

I have no problem with theory being in the academies--I even quite like some theory. Nor do I have a problem with an academic work assuming that the reader has a familiarity with the topic and the works under discussion. Most academic works are not meant to be entry level. I even accept a certain level of jargon in cases where the work is specialist and needs it.

I just have no patience when what should be perfectly readable papers and books are larded with jargon from popular continental philosophers like Lacan and Derrida and Foucault, ect. There is an ideological basis for this, since those thinkers tended to believe that clarity in prose was itself an ideological fiction, used in order to further the discourse of power, and therefore clarity ought to be avoided. But a lot of students now are just being taught this style as some academic norm rather than because of any ideological concern. As a result, many students and scholars feel that complex thinking is generated by this style, and so will often use complex and labyrinthine descriptions for fairly straightforward ideas as if that would turn the latter into the former. Jargon-heavy theoretical prose is starting to become synonymous with proper academic tone, unfortunately.

It's easy to fall into the trap of caricaturing academia, tho', so it should be noted that not all scholarship is like this, and that some scholarly works are enormously complex because they genuinely have to be. Good work continues to be done.

[Gregory]

My field of graduate study was history, which in my experience is one of the few fields left where there is very little jargon, possibly because most historians recognize that you don't need to develop a whole conceptual vocabulary to talk about the past, and most want their work to be understood by readers outside of their area of specialization. It can be challenging enough wading into (analyzing, synthesizing etc.) existing concepts and ideologies relevant to the subject without complicating things further by developing and applying jargon. Some historiographical trend or another will always have an influence, however, and younger scholars trying to make their mark may want to try to distinguish their work with jargon-laden writing, thinking that buzzwords will give a piece of writing more currency (e.g., something like "subaltern," I'd say) but what it does is make the writing more quickly become dated. There's arguably a similar effect to salting in trendy references to continental philosophers or "theorists."

A really talented historian (Peter Linebaugh and Eric Van Young come to mind) can successfully employ all kinds of pyrotechnics (non-jargon) in their writing and have it still be enjoyable and satisfying to read, but when the lesser writers among us try to do this, the results are seldom good. I believe most people reading history want simple yet powerful writing, which is deceptively difficult to cultivate. And regardless of a lack of jargon, I've seen some history profs subtly encourage their students to write in complex sentence structures as a rule. And so many undergraduates seem eager to write long, tortured sentences with lots of semicolons, terms like "and/or," etc. etc. and I'll stop myself here before I get into a real rant. Anyway, I agree with almost everything being said here.

[domino harvey]

I love theory when it's used to further new ideas. Unfortunately, it all too often is used in place of them

[knives]

That's pretty much my stance too. Over at a local school which will not be named theory and philosophy have been cut entirely and the students are all the worse for it. It's more I want them to understand and use well the terms than not at all.

[warren oates]

I love theory when it's used to further new ideas. Unfortunately, it all too often is used in place of them.

Easy to agree with domino on this one. I feel extremely lucky to have been taught mostly by professors who understood this difference and were willing to fight posers on both sides of the misuse/misunderstanding of contemporary theory. Though, to be sure, even ignoring the current trend toward deliberate poetic obfuscation, the quality and clarity of any thinker's prose doesn't always correlate with the quality and importance of his/her ideas. I'm thinking especially of someone like Hegel.

As for the rediculous review of The Mill And The Cross, I liked the film more than most here but those moving horses bothered me too to the point where I wondered if it might not have been impossible to solve as a technical problem with CGI and still have the image look consistent without having to post-freeze frame all the humans too, which isn't at all the feeling he seems to have wanted from those images. That is, the movement was almost certainly left in intentionally but perhaps ideally the director would have preferred for everyone and everything to remain as still as possible in those frames without the manipulation of any post FX.

[puxzkkx]

Only undergraduates? I've read some graduate papers that unfortunately did the same thing.

Ditto professional writers. When I edited regularly, I much preferred dealing with journalists to dealing with academics.

In any form of critical study you're gonna find writing that actually aims to be impenetrable.

A quote from a reading I had to do recently for a film class, written by a university professor (on Antonioni's Blow-Up):

"What phenomenologically underwrites photographic visuality is the promise of the aleatory, the fortuitous - the correlative of which may be something along the lines of Barthes' notion of the punctum, or the 'contingent subzone of the still image'. This I shall return to shortly."

[Mr Sausage]

The thing about writing like that is that it's indistinguishable from parody.

[MichaelB]

In any form of critical study you're gonna find writing that actually aims to be impenetrable.

I once had to deal with prose like that, submitted by someone who clearly hadn't bothered to read the style guide - one of whose core requirements was that the text should be comprehensible to "an intelligent 14-year-old".

I tried translating it before giving up: it was so utterly at odds with what had been commissioned that I had to send it back and ask for a complete rewrite. In fact, I'm not sure if one ever arrived.

[zedz]

I just have no patience when what should be perfectly readable papers and books are larded with jargon from popular continental philosophers like Lacan and Derrida and Foucault, ect. There is an ideological basis for this, since those thinkers tended to believe that clarity in prose was itself an ideological fiction, used in order to further the discourse of power, and therefore clarity ought to be avoided.

I've always found the argument to be completely bogus, and just an excuse for bad writing. Obfuscation perpetuates inequalities of power. In this respect, academic jargon functions pretty much in exactly the same way as legal jargon or bureaucratic jargon - it excludes those outside the elite.

And clarity is not an antonym of complexity.

[Mr Sausage]

I just have no patience when what should be perfectly readable papers and books are larded with jargon from popular continental philosophers like Lacan and Derrida and Foucault, ect. There is an ideological basis for this, since those thinkers tended to believe that clarity in prose was itself an ideological fiction, used in order to further the discourse of power, and therefore clarity ought to be avoided.

I've always found the argument to be completely bogus, and just an excuse for bad writing. Obfuscation perpetuates inequalities of power. In this respect, academic jargon functions pretty much in exactly the same way as legal jargon or bureaucratic jargon - it excludes those outside the elite.

And clarity is not an antonym of complexity.

Oh, I agree. I am slightly more sympathetic to the deconstructionist point that clarity assumes the existence of stable signs and signifiers, which deconstructionists argue are impossible in the post-modern era. Hence clarity in writing is an illusion and only by using that jargon heavy style do you have a chance of actually communicating what you intend through words.

Obviously I don't buy it, but it is slightly less forehead-slapping than the ideology of power one.

[bamwc2]

I just have no patience when what should be perfectly readable papers and books are larded with jargon from popular continental philosophers like Lacan and Derrida and Foucault, ect. There is an ideological basis for this, since those thinkers tended to believe that clarity in prose was itself an ideological fiction, used in order to further the discourse of power, and therefore clarity ought to be avoided.

I've always found the argument to be completely bogus, and just an excuse for bad writing. Obfuscation perpetuates inequalities of power. In this respect, academic jargon functions pretty much in exactly the same way as legal jargon or bureaucratic jargon - it excludes those outside the elite.

And clarity is not an antonym of complexity.

Amen. As someone who's spent eight years of graduate work in philosophy (and will have a Ph.D. in a couple of weeks), I've never understood the writings of or cared for the style of any of the philosophers that you listed. I must admit to finding the first volume of Foucault's History of Sexuality useful for a paper that I once wrote on Platonic prohibitions against homosexuality (which, by the way, he wished he could extend to all forms of sexuality. You can think of him as the more noble minded Rick Santorum of his day). Just sticking to history, Foucault was lucid and useful, but when I tried reading his introduction to the work it was completely incomprehensible.

There's a general belief amongst analytic philosophers that there is tradition in German thought, starting at least with Kant, that the more incomprehensible and unclear you are, the more profound you appear. You can actually see this with subsequent authors in continental tradition like Hegel (really, especially Hegel), Schopenhauer, and so on. When Nietzsche came along and melded philosophy with classicism, it only reinforced these ideas with his rejection of Socrates and all of his successors. Hence, you have Heidegger's interest in figures like Parmenides and Heraclitus, who were renowned in their day for their obscurity, but not Plato, who was probably the clearest of all the ancients (although the original writings of Aristotle are said to have been very clear, they have, alas, not survived). We can then see this seep into the French tradition with Sartre (a student of Heidegger's), and from his to the post-structuralists and post-modernists. As someone who works primarily in analytic philosophy of language, epistemology, and ethics, I find most film theory rather disappointing in it's sacrifice of clarity and rigor for style and faux profundity.

[gcgiles1dollarbin]

It is interesting to me that the self-negating/-validating principles of endless deferral, reflexivity, preemption, elusive objects, etc., in the likes of Derrida and Lacan, for example, are rarely applied to the texts of those authors by their acolytes. While I think Lacan would enjoy the fact that forty different intelligent people have forty different interpretations of Écrits, most academics would like to think that there is a determinable meaning in his work that can be unambiguously apprehended through analytical rigor--a determinable meaning that is generally accepted and ascribed to by other academics. I am always surprised by this positivist outlook among people who normally disparage positivism. If you're going to discredit a philosophical lineage as an epistemic symptom or evidence of hegemony or what-have-you, then shouldn't you stop abiding by it? Why not capitulate to the notion of freeplay, for example, and explore the implications of this subatomic idea by, for one thing, dispensing with the myth of "rigor"?
Which isn't to say that I don't enjoy these authors, but their dominance in academia doesn't mean that they are less fictive than Clive Cussler or Marcel Proust.

EDIT: By decrying "rigor," I realize I sound like I'm refuting bamwc2 above, but I'm actually more in alliance with the calls for clarity in this thread. Although he/she invoked that word as a possible remedy to obfuscation, I'm not directly engaging him/her in my arguments, although at the same time, I do think that there are benefits to obfuscation (as opposed to obscurantism), as long as no one thinks there is some sort of master key to Of Grammatology, for example, that years of study will put within reach.

[MichaelB]

Which isn't to say that I don't enjoy these authors, but their dominance in academia doesn't mean that they are less fictive than Clive Cussler or Marcel Proust.

This may be the very first time in the history of human civilisation that those two names have appeared in the same sentence.

[gcgiles1dollarbin]

Which isn't to say that I don't enjoy these authors, but their dominance in academia doesn't mean that they are less fictive than Clive Cussler or Marcel Proust.

This may be the very first time in the history of human civilisation that those two names have appeared in the same sentence.

Don't you think it was about time?

[Brian C]

This may be the very first time in the history of human civilisation that those two names have appeared in the same sentence.

Sadly, no:

Culture takes on many more dimensions: not only orchestral music, but also rock'n'roll, rhythm'n'blues, and rap; not only portraiture and landscapes, but also Andy Warhol soup cans and abstract paintings; novels not only by Virginia Wolff, Marcel Proust, and William Faulkner, but also by Nora Roberts, J.K. Rowling, and Clive Cussler.

Although I'm quite willing to give gcgiles1dollarbin special recognition here, since Boudreaux was simply making a generic high-art/low-art contrast between the two.

[Mr Sausage]

Andy Warhol and abstract paintings are low art?

[Brian C]

You asking my opinion or questioning his sentence structure?

[Mr Sausage]

You asking my opinion or questioning his sentence structure?

Well, neither, I was just confused that those would be someone's example of low-culture painting.

[Brian C]

Who knows, maybe they're not. The quoted sentence seems more like a way to jack up the word count than a way to actually make a point about something.

[Mr Sausage]

Who knows, maybe they're not. The quoted sentence seems more like a way to jack up the word count than a way to actually make a point about something.

His sentence structure makes it clear that they are. It's all "not only...but also" statements, with the former always designating the high culture examples and the latter the low culture ones.

[zedz]

Andy Warhol and abstract paintings are low art?

Yes, it looks like Boudreaux really is that dumb.

And gcgiles hits the nail on the head with the implicit "then why are you bothering to write this?" gotcha.

Further to that, in my wayward academic career, the professors most fervently wedded to post-modernism were, by a very long chalk, the ones most violently opposed to dissenting views. Even back in the late eighties, there was always a significant proportion of students in the theory class who wanted to challenge or question whichever theorist we were tackling at the time, but they were continually, methodically shut down. (At one point the lecturer actually yelled, "You're wrong! We're not discussing this!" to a student!) On the other hand, the two professors I had (in completely different disciplines) who were most vocally and resolutely opposed to post-modernism in all its guises were the two who most keenly welcomed dissent and argument in their classes, and those were the classes in which people really could get to grips with theory and the different ways it applied to the texts and academic disciplines in question.

[gcgiles1dollarbin]

I think that phenomenon you observe of poststructuralist zeal has a lot to do with the radical politics often involved--the occasionally stifling combination of high theory and social justice. What better place for activism than the classroom, of course, but at the same time, it can be not very conducive to an open market of ideas (although, I can only guess how that professor might disdainfully respond to the phrase "open market of ideas": oppressive, liberal capitalist, humanist...). Entrenchment and politics often go hand-in-hand.

At any rate, the best that can be said these days is that there is more tolerance toward the magpie, picking and choosing his arguments among the various fields of critical theory. One can blithely juggle Gramsci, Kristeva, Spivak, and Butler within the same article, and I think it serves the reader well to note how a cultural Marxist, a Lacanian feminist, a postcolonialist, and a queer theorist might intersect at certain points of an argument.

[Mr Sausage]

My approach to theory these days is that it's often a fascinating account of how this or that individual reads, but not necessarily a way that I myself want to read. In general I prefer practical criticism. The critics I tend to respond to the most are close readers and archetypal critics.