While there is a lot of Truth to what you say about postmodernist text, I think you have missed the mark here in many ways....I will write some more later if I remember, on mobile at the moment.
What happens when your social movement becomes run by college grads, for college grads. Keeping the riff-raff out is a feature; they can be instructed by their betters at the next DEI seminar.
I mean...I don't disagree in a broad sense. Yes. I think these are very insular communities that have adopted a lot of jargon to the point where they created a specialized language that only they understand, but doesn't say very much when translated.
Academia has always had a jargon problem; that's up to them. What I'm afraid of is that the jargonizing (and its attendant self-righteousness) trickle down to regular circles. Communication is hard enough without people word policing. I suspect that's what's behind the movement; they don't WANT to communicate; they want a way to show how Righteous they are and feel superior to the so-5-minutes-ago less righteous.
I learned some valuable lessons spending time working in multi-lingual spaces. Even when you use big words unintentionally, you have to stop and remind yourself that your reader speaks English as a second language. There's probably a way to say what you mean without using big words, giant sentences, and things like idioms or metaphors.
I expect most of the people in the halls of obscurantism have good intentions. They were brought up in a system where being complicated was a status symbol. It's like the guy who makes too much noise at the gym. He's trying to worship at the House of Gains, but he's still annoying to the people around him. That gets a little more important when the subject is basically the sum-total of human knowledge rather than sick quads.
As the saying goes, don't assume malice when dumb shit will suffice as an explanation.
Eh. As a rule, we shouldn't be a jerk to people with health issues...shouldn't be a jerk in general. If nothing else, I know a few people who went to Iraq or Afghanistan and experienced some uncomfortably close explosions.
But I don't think that an earnest rejection of critical thinking really counts as a disability. Willfully shutting off your brain is more akin to those folks who elect to have a limb removed or blind themselves because they identify as disabled.
I don’t disagree that a ton of philosophy is inaccessible, but “postmodern” (essentially a meaningless term) thinkers are not the primary or only culprits. One cannot read rigorous philosophy without understanding a lot of the history, terms, etc. that are used in very niche ways. Is a lot of it overly verbose? Yes. Did this start with postmodernism? No way. Read Kant and tell me that he was trying to make it simple. Yet, he is one of the most important thinkers of modernity. Some of it is lame and would be much more helpful to the general populous if it was said plainly. But there’s also a lot that requires very specific, nuanced, and crazy-making terms that only make sense in context of other ideas and are probably irrelevant to most people who don’t really care about getting into the weeds on very complicated topics.
There is a difference between writing that is inaccessible because it refers to concepts the lay reader does not already know, and then there is writing that is inaccessible because it makes no sense. Kant makes no sense to the person on the street, but if you gave them a philosophy 101 course, he would. Writing of the ilk criticized in this piece makes no sense to the person on the street unless you give them LSD. Postmodern writing, or whatever you want to call it, isn't s-tier philosophy whose seeming inscrutability is a sign that it's incredibly advanced material — it's just fucking bullshit.
You’re making two different arguments in the article. The first is that the academic elites use high brow words and don’t speak plainly enough, which I don’t disagree with. Your second is that the writers’ works don’t have any value, point, sense- essentially meaningless bullshit if I follow you. You don’t stay consistent with the first because you use it to somehow conclude the latter. Unless you can give an analysis of a particular work, why it is incoherent, what it’s real logical problems are, etc. you haven’t made your point. You’ve essentially made an argument that is hand-wavey in the same way you accuse continental philosophy of being.
Being "hand-wavey" is not in any way by accident; that's the seriousness it deserves. I've got nice leather-bound copies of Descartes, Kant, Marx. I've read the classics. But when you read even the first chapter of Das Kapital, you very much get the impression that Karl is absolutely pained in trying to be understood. He goes off on a tangent about the price of corn. He's trying so hard to make the concept something that is tactile and relatable.
You are, in fact, making exactly the error I'm trying to illustrate. You're presuming that philosophy need be barely coherent. I fall into the trap sometimes myself. I considered whether to delete the word "tactile" above because I wasn't sure if it was relatable enough. At the end of the day, bundling together jargon is easy, and only requires that you have enough books on your shelf. Being coherent when dealing with complex subjects is hard.
I agree with your comment. But, if you’re going to be dismissive about a particular philosophy, have a concrete critique about the arguments instead of some wholesale rejection of a whole particular branch of the discipline. That’s doing philosophy. If you want to engage in culture war perpetuation, by all means. I’ll bow out. You haven’t said why any particular author (many of whom disagree with each other) is incoherent.
I consider the incoherence to be self evident. I can't argue against it, because it first needs some semblance of substance to argue against. To argue against it is in some way to legitimize nonsense.
Well, if that’s your policy, then we’re clearly engaged in different pursuits. If you value calling bullshit, then I’ll give it to you straight- you aren’t doing anything helpful or substantive w/ your article. That’s your right. But you can’t have your cake and eat it too. If you want to champion helpful discourse, throwing an argument out there that is lazy and circular is part of the problem that makes debates about meaning in popular discourse impossible. You’re part of the problem bc you’re not enlightening people with how to make philosophy accessible, you’re contributing to culture war bullshit that makes terms less clear. The fact that your response to me is that you take something as self-evident (clearly without ever having given it a fair shake) is bullshit. I will say you have done me a service though. It’s a good reminder to stay away from the broader culture war conversation.
Engaging in post-modernist theorizing has always struck me as rather akin to stringing up fairy lights in a dorm room already well-flooded by fluorescent tubes...which is to say, pretty, I guess, in an artificial and contrived sort of way.
I picked up a Frantz Fanon book that was laying around a common area in my freshman year of college, and I lost all respect for such theorizers in a few short pages. They have such an aversion to actually saying a single concrete thing that it gets painful. It comes off as more acutely insecure than any awkward nerdy guy I've ever been friends with, and there have been a lot. The cowardly logic seems to be, "if I don't actually say anything, no one can call me wrong." It's an aversion to actual debate and a preference for the "yes, and" rules of stage improv, but with leaden moralizing instead of humor.
Hmm. I'm not familiar with Fanon. I'm two books down until I can read something else, but I'll admit that Caribbean Marxism is not my strong point. Thank you for introducing me to it.
I just…. Anyone who dismisses Fanon, or any theorist, “in a few short pages,” simply does not know how to read theory. They are examining an 18-wheeler with a carpentry hammer, complaining that all these nails look funny.
Continental philosophy isn’t just another subject area, it’s an entirely different way of writing and of thinking; a language in which, if you have any intention of becoming proficient, you must first learn how to read.
The author of the above anti-intellectual drivel also seems to fall into this Dunning Krueger pit. Academic theory, especially the writings of scholars like Deleuze and Foucault, is not text with which you can perform close readings without context, as you are used to doing in high school English class with fiction or poetry. The meaning (and yes, such texts do indeed communicate cogent ideas, hotly debated and reinterpreted as they are) is constructed through strange and specific deployment of a vocabulary that builds upon usage constructed not only earlier within the text, but indeed, within other texts to which it is responding or referencing.
Philosophy is therefore to be read preferably in its entirety, plus some grounding of the topic’s context and leading luminaries… At the absolute minimum, if you are like the above author and seem short on time, subject familiarity, patience, etc, philosophy must at the very least be read with the help of a well-respected guide, or a reader, like Rabinow's Foucault Reader. (He may not have a deep understanding of Foucault, but he will get you grounded to start making your own sense of the material.) Also starting with simpler pieces like The Order of Discourse or Madness and Civilization would also be helpful.
Long story short- to pretend there’s no content in Foucault or other mainstream philosophy is self-deluding, deliberate ignorance. To be clear, you’re certainly entitled to not like Foucault! Join the club; a MOUNTAIN of theory has been written in critical response to him, refiguring his ideas, tearing him down, driving trucks through the holes in his thinking— but to disagree with anyone, you must first understand what they’re saying- or else, admit that you don’t have the… time… to grasp the material. To call it “bullshit” only exposes your subject matter ignorance.
While I appreciate your comment, I don't think I exactly agree. I do believe that the real thinker is the one who can understand complex subjects and communicate them clearly. I'm reminded of someone like Bertrand Russell who absolutely bent over backward to try to illustrate difficult concepts in a way the average person could understand. Actually, a lot of Der Wiener Kreis had a knack for this. I think of, from the first paragraph, Dennett, who to 20-year-old me, just held my hand and explained things in plain language. I think of Locke. I don't necessarily agree with Locke on everything, but he wrote understandably.
Au contraire. Continental philosophy IS just another subject area. It is not a special category with special rules. We may apply to it the metrics & considerations applied to anything else.
The common style in which continental philosophy is written is intentionally vague and abstruse. I have read philosophy from other times and places. It was all quite sensible and readable at first glance. Novel concepts are introduced, explained, and built upon. That is generally how writing is done. Books on quantum physics go much the same way as do books on formal logic. There's no requirement for induction into some kind of secret society of true understanding before you dare crack a paperback.
That you make continental philosophy out to be a special category which only the "enlightened" are capable of "truly getting" illustrates my point excellently. How much of the drivel does someone have to read before they can call it drivel? How many works in the canon read cover-to-cover would be enough? How much analysis needs to be digested before one is considered "qualified" to call it pap? One gets a distinct sense of a No True Scotsman situation - "Anyone who calls it bunk just isn't well-versed enough to understand it."
I understand that works in the field are not literally "drivel", they are purportedly internally consistent, and most likely are. But my question for you is - do the leading lights of this field understand these works any better than I do, considering, as the article mentioned, a few pranksters were able to publish literal intentional drivel in the field's journals? Were the eminent reviewers of those submissions not initiated enough to truly understand the field either?
While there is a lot of Truth to what you say about postmodernist text, I think you have missed the mark here in many ways....I will write some more later if I remember, on mobile at the moment.
By all means, please disagree as strongly as possible. I love disagreement. That's where the meat is.
What happens when your social movement becomes run by college grads, for college grads. Keeping the riff-raff out is a feature; they can be instructed by their betters at the next DEI seminar.
I mean...I don't disagree in a broad sense. Yes. I think these are very insular communities that have adopted a lot of jargon to the point where they created a specialized language that only they understand, but doesn't say very much when translated.
Academia has always had a jargon problem; that's up to them. What I'm afraid of is that the jargonizing (and its attendant self-righteousness) trickle down to regular circles. Communication is hard enough without people word policing. I suspect that's what's behind the movement; they don't WANT to communicate; they want a way to show how Righteous they are and feel superior to the so-5-minutes-ago less righteous.
I learned some valuable lessons spending time working in multi-lingual spaces. Even when you use big words unintentionally, you have to stop and remind yourself that your reader speaks English as a second language. There's probably a way to say what you mean without using big words, giant sentences, and things like idioms or metaphors.
I expect most of the people in the halls of obscurantism have good intentions. They were brought up in a system where being complicated was a status symbol. It's like the guy who makes too much noise at the gym. He's trying to worship at the House of Gains, but he's still annoying to the people around him. That gets a little more important when the subject is basically the sum-total of human knowledge rather than sick quads.
As the saying goes, don't assume malice when dumb shit will suffice as an explanation.
"Dumb shit" is ableist. :)
Eh. As a rule, we shouldn't be a jerk to people with health issues...shouldn't be a jerk in general. If nothing else, I know a few people who went to Iraq or Afghanistan and experienced some uncomfortably close explosions.
But I don't think that an earnest rejection of critical thinking really counts as a disability. Willfully shutting off your brain is more akin to those folks who elect to have a limb removed or blind themselves because they identify as disabled.
I don’t disagree that a ton of philosophy is inaccessible, but “postmodern” (essentially a meaningless term) thinkers are not the primary or only culprits. One cannot read rigorous philosophy without understanding a lot of the history, terms, etc. that are used in very niche ways. Is a lot of it overly verbose? Yes. Did this start with postmodernism? No way. Read Kant and tell me that he was trying to make it simple. Yet, he is one of the most important thinkers of modernity. Some of it is lame and would be much more helpful to the general populous if it was said plainly. But there’s also a lot that requires very specific, nuanced, and crazy-making terms that only make sense in context of other ideas and are probably irrelevant to most people who don’t really care about getting into the weeds on very complicated topics.
There is a difference between writing that is inaccessible because it refers to concepts the lay reader does not already know, and then there is writing that is inaccessible because it makes no sense. Kant makes no sense to the person on the street, but if you gave them a philosophy 101 course, he would. Writing of the ilk criticized in this piece makes no sense to the person on the street unless you give them LSD. Postmodern writing, or whatever you want to call it, isn't s-tier philosophy whose seeming inscrutability is a sign that it's incredibly advanced material — it's just fucking bullshit.
You’re making two different arguments in the article. The first is that the academic elites use high brow words and don’t speak plainly enough, which I don’t disagree with. Your second is that the writers’ works don’t have any value, point, sense- essentially meaningless bullshit if I follow you. You don’t stay consistent with the first because you use it to somehow conclude the latter. Unless you can give an analysis of a particular work, why it is incoherent, what it’s real logical problems are, etc. you haven’t made your point. You’ve essentially made an argument that is hand-wavey in the same way you accuse continental philosophy of being.
Being "hand-wavey" is not in any way by accident; that's the seriousness it deserves. I've got nice leather-bound copies of Descartes, Kant, Marx. I've read the classics. But when you read even the first chapter of Das Kapital, you very much get the impression that Karl is absolutely pained in trying to be understood. He goes off on a tangent about the price of corn. He's trying so hard to make the concept something that is tactile and relatable.
You are, in fact, making exactly the error I'm trying to illustrate. You're presuming that philosophy need be barely coherent. I fall into the trap sometimes myself. I considered whether to delete the word "tactile" above because I wasn't sure if it was relatable enough. At the end of the day, bundling together jargon is easy, and only requires that you have enough books on your shelf. Being coherent when dealing with complex subjects is hard.
I agree with your comment. But, if you’re going to be dismissive about a particular philosophy, have a concrete critique about the arguments instead of some wholesale rejection of a whole particular branch of the discipline. That’s doing philosophy. If you want to engage in culture war perpetuation, by all means. I’ll bow out. You haven’t said why any particular author (many of whom disagree with each other) is incoherent.
I consider the incoherence to be self evident. I can't argue against it, because it first needs some semblance of substance to argue against. To argue against it is in some way to legitimize nonsense.
Well, if that’s your policy, then we’re clearly engaged in different pursuits. If you value calling bullshit, then I’ll give it to you straight- you aren’t doing anything helpful or substantive w/ your article. That’s your right. But you can’t have your cake and eat it too. If you want to champion helpful discourse, throwing an argument out there that is lazy and circular is part of the problem that makes debates about meaning in popular discourse impossible. You’re part of the problem bc you’re not enlightening people with how to make philosophy accessible, you’re contributing to culture war bullshit that makes terms less clear. The fact that your response to me is that you take something as self-evident (clearly without ever having given it a fair shake) is bullshit. I will say you have done me a service though. It’s a good reminder to stay away from the broader culture war conversation.
Engaging in post-modernist theorizing has always struck me as rather akin to stringing up fairy lights in a dorm room already well-flooded by fluorescent tubes...which is to say, pretty, I guess, in an artificial and contrived sort of way.
I picked up a Frantz Fanon book that was laying around a common area in my freshman year of college, and I lost all respect for such theorizers in a few short pages. They have such an aversion to actually saying a single concrete thing that it gets painful. It comes off as more acutely insecure than any awkward nerdy guy I've ever been friends with, and there have been a lot. The cowardly logic seems to be, "if I don't actually say anything, no one can call me wrong." It's an aversion to actual debate and a preference for the "yes, and" rules of stage improv, but with leaden moralizing instead of humor.
Hmm. I'm not familiar with Fanon. I'm two books down until I can read something else, but I'll admit that Caribbean Marxism is not my strong point. Thank you for introducing me to it.
I just…. Anyone who dismisses Fanon, or any theorist, “in a few short pages,” simply does not know how to read theory. They are examining an 18-wheeler with a carpentry hammer, complaining that all these nails look funny.
Continental philosophy isn’t just another subject area, it’s an entirely different way of writing and of thinking; a language in which, if you have any intention of becoming proficient, you must first learn how to read.
The author of the above anti-intellectual drivel also seems to fall into this Dunning Krueger pit. Academic theory, especially the writings of scholars like Deleuze and Foucault, is not text with which you can perform close readings without context, as you are used to doing in high school English class with fiction or poetry. The meaning (and yes, such texts do indeed communicate cogent ideas, hotly debated and reinterpreted as they are) is constructed through strange and specific deployment of a vocabulary that builds upon usage constructed not only earlier within the text, but indeed, within other texts to which it is responding or referencing.
Philosophy is therefore to be read preferably in its entirety, plus some grounding of the topic’s context and leading luminaries… At the absolute minimum, if you are like the above author and seem short on time, subject familiarity, patience, etc, philosophy must at the very least be read with the help of a well-respected guide, or a reader, like Rabinow's Foucault Reader. (He may not have a deep understanding of Foucault, but he will get you grounded to start making your own sense of the material.) Also starting with simpler pieces like The Order of Discourse or Madness and Civilization would also be helpful.
Long story short- to pretend there’s no content in Foucault or other mainstream philosophy is self-deluding, deliberate ignorance. To be clear, you’re certainly entitled to not like Foucault! Join the club; a MOUNTAIN of theory has been written in critical response to him, refiguring his ideas, tearing him down, driving trucks through the holes in his thinking— but to disagree with anyone, you must first understand what they’re saying- or else, admit that you don’t have the… time… to grasp the material. To call it “bullshit” only exposes your subject matter ignorance.
I can’t believe I made an account for this.
While I appreciate your comment, I don't think I exactly agree. I do believe that the real thinker is the one who can understand complex subjects and communicate them clearly. I'm reminded of someone like Bertrand Russell who absolutely bent over backward to try to illustrate difficult concepts in a way the average person could understand. Actually, a lot of Der Wiener Kreis had a knack for this. I think of, from the first paragraph, Dennett, who to 20-year-old me, just held my hand and explained things in plain language. I think of Locke. I don't necessarily agree with Locke on everything, but he wrote understandably.
Au contraire. Continental philosophy IS just another subject area. It is not a special category with special rules. We may apply to it the metrics & considerations applied to anything else.
The common style in which continental philosophy is written is intentionally vague and abstruse. I have read philosophy from other times and places. It was all quite sensible and readable at first glance. Novel concepts are introduced, explained, and built upon. That is generally how writing is done. Books on quantum physics go much the same way as do books on formal logic. There's no requirement for induction into some kind of secret society of true understanding before you dare crack a paperback.
That you make continental philosophy out to be a special category which only the "enlightened" are capable of "truly getting" illustrates my point excellently. How much of the drivel does someone have to read before they can call it drivel? How many works in the canon read cover-to-cover would be enough? How much analysis needs to be digested before one is considered "qualified" to call it pap? One gets a distinct sense of a No True Scotsman situation - "Anyone who calls it bunk just isn't well-versed enough to understand it."
I understand that works in the field are not literally "drivel", they are purportedly internally consistent, and most likely are. But my question for you is - do the leading lights of this field understand these works any better than I do, considering, as the article mentioned, a few pranksters were able to publish literal intentional drivel in the field's journals? Were the eminent reviewers of those submissions not initiated enough to truly understand the field either?