Comments on: fashionable nonsense

By: Cam Sculpin

Cam Sculpin — Mon, 26 Sep 2005 20:48:25 +0000

Heh. I can see that. Oddly enough, though, I’ve found an awful lot of modern English-language philosophy to be very accessible, lucid, and even charming.

It’s philosophy’s weak and pretentious little conjoined-twin sisters, literary theory and cultural criticism, that give me the migraine.

I’d love to test the Dr. Fox Hypothesis with philosophers and Theorists and see who comes out most impressed by muddled piffle. I’m pretty sure it’s a safe bet.

By: mizducky

mizducky — Mon, 26 Sep 2005 19:53:30 +0000

My main impression from the few philosophy courses I’ve taken is that, if I didn’t know better, I’d guess that all authors of philosophy books were getting paid by the word. Either that, or they’d all taken their cue from the 19th century German philosophers, who could make a single sentence go on for something like a page and a half–which, I was given to understand, is not all that difficult to have happen in German, but considerably more challenging (and scary to read) when imitated in English.

By: Cam Sculpin

Cam Sculpin — Mon, 26 Sep 2005 05:13:51 +0000

Derrida? Probably. That was all the rage at the time in her department. I’d hazard a guess that she was a fan of Cixous, too. But I don’t recall exactly which continental blowhards she was crushed out on.

What I do remember is her apparently rock-solid belief that her obscure literary bafflegab was going to change the world. The world of obscure literary bafflegabbers, of course, is the real world. The rest of us are merely content providers.

By: citrine

citrine — Mon, 26 Sep 2005 05:07:57 +0000

learning how to make the more interesting or useful things more understandable to people with better things to do with their time than regurgitate jargon

This part of it was always the useful part to me too, both in the limited ways I read stuff myself and when I wanted to know more from friends with a fancier education in cultural critique.

By: Mia

Mia — Mon, 26 Sep 2005 03:37:28 +0000

Lemme guess. Was she a big fan of Jacques Derida? He was notorious for that kind of pretention and the promotion thereof.

(Actually, I guess plenty of others were, too. Derida was just one of the more egregious (and least readable, imho).)

I always thought one of the best things I got out of reading all that literary/cultural theory stuff was the vocabulary to mock some of the sillier of it’s notions; along with learning how to make the more interesting or useful things more understandable to people with better things to do with their time than regurgitate jargon.

By: Cam Sculpin

Cam Sculpin — Mon, 26 Sep 2005 03:06:20 +0000

I should probably have written something more like, “… musn’t write about socioliterary matters with clarity and precision.” She made it pretty clear that poor dumb sods like me could, if we wished, amuse ourselves writing our simple little scientific articles about frogs and rocks and so on. But the more important and passionate work of cultural criticism requires thick gobbledygook.

By: Rechercher

Rechercher — Mon, 26 Sep 2005 00:44:23 +0000

I will write in an elitist way to denounce elitism.

Hypocrite.

By: surlyben

surlyben — Mon, 26 Sep 2005 00:02:08 +0000

I just like that you remembered to capitalize “Theory”.

By: Mia

Mia — Sun, 25 Sep 2005 23:47:28 +0000

for myself, i never did have much luck with “Knock it off you overcompensated elitist twit.”

But that’s more likely because nobody wants to be identified as the “elitist twit” — America is a classless society, remember? No really, it is! We said so!

So a plain old, “You’re full of it, and here’s why,” can sometimes work, if you don’t act like you’re talking about “them”.

By: co149

co149 — Sun, 25 Sep 2005 23:33:43 +0000

for myself, i never did have much luck with “Knock it off you overcompensated elitist twit.” So the elitist-theory lady might be right.