Postmodern Humanities

[brendan]

http://richarddawkins.net/article,824,Postmodernism-Disrobed,Richard-Dawkins-Nature

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/arts/atoday/stories/s255375.htm

http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo/

[bubble sunglasses]

     Toby Young exposing Alain de Botton's lack of substance

  "By the time I got to this sentence I'd learnt to recognise it as vintage de Botton. He's in the habit of regurgitating a fairly rudimentary bit of common sense with the air of someone imparting a startlingly original observation. Status Anxiety contains one of these Polonius-like pearls of wisdom on every page. Here he is on the subject of Happiness: "We are led to imagine ourselves scaling the steep sides of the cliff face of happiness to reach a wide, high plateau on which to continue our lives; we are not reminded that soon after reaching the summit we will be called down again into fresh lowlands of anxiety and despair." In other words, money can't buy happiness."
 
 "By the time I reached the end of Status Anxiety I felt rather foolish for ever having envied de Botton. Far from being the erudite renaissance man I imagined--Dr Love, as some newspapers would have it--he's more like one of Craig Brown's satirical creations. What better way to expose the Francophile pretensions of Britain's reading public than to dream up this Swiss-French version of Chauncey Gardener? The thing that makes de Botton such a great comic character is the gap between his own estimation of his abilities and that of anyone with two brain cells to rub together. Status anxiety, it seems, is one of the few shortcomings this multi-millionaire doesn't suffer from."

  http://www.tobyyoung.co.uk/312/status-anxiety-by-alain-de-botton.html

[Eriny]

It's quite funny reading The Australian opinion pages and all the people who talk about how terrible postmodernism is, but you can tell they don't really know what postmodernism actually is. They seem to think that postmodernists think that a text message is as good as or better than Shakespeare.

It's interesting that none of those websites are a critique of postmodernism itself or what postmodernism tries to do, just the way it is often written. It may be good to keep in mind that the excerpts Dawkins used are out-of-context and use a lot of jargon specific to the respective disciplines of the writers. They are difficult to read, but they do have a point. I suppose it's like reading a science text or a law text without knowledge of the meaning of words that are bandied about. I do find the lack of clarity of some writers, as a student, to be frustrating though! But rewarding once I can work through it and understand what it is they're going on about.

[brendan]

I have had the benefit of reading a wide range of academic texts including the obscure academic writings from the people that Dawkins refers to. I really dislike popular accusation that any quote that doesn't cite the whole bloody text is "out of context". Any quote that doesn't cite the whole thing is, by definition, out of context! That's the point. It's a quote.

I think this cartoon makes a good point:



Professor Robert Frank provides an explanation as to why academic writing in humanities is so obscure and unintelligible (at 38:11):
http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=QalNVxeIKEE

He makes the same point in his book which is available for preview in Google Books:
http://books.google.com.au/books?id=1nGy0qL6Yp8C&pg=PA141&lpg=PA141&dq=I+propose+to+embrace+tactical+strategies&source=bl&ots=ZPVuJQGSnk&sig=Rak59sAR97UDuBnnwyI3Wm7PtNo&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=1&ct=result#PPA141,M1

[brendan]

they do have a point.

Yes they might, but the points/analyses are not very insightful, and they could have made the same point with a lot less words, and with a lot less obscure words at that. This was most evident to me when I was studying Legal Theory. Once you did understand their jargon, you realized that the author wasn't saying much of substance at all.

[Glockmeister]

Need I be reminded of the Sokal Affair

[brendan]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fashionable_Nonsense
    * Using scientific or pseudoscientific terminology without bothering much about what these words mean.
    * Importing concepts from the natural sciences into the humanities without the slightest justification, and without providing any rationale for their use.
    * Displaying superficial erudition by shamelessly throwing around technical terms where they are irrelevant, presumably to impress and intimidate the non-specialist reader.
    * Manipulating words and phrases that are, in fact, meaningless. Self-assurance on topics far beyond the competence of the author and exploiting the prestige of science to give discourses a veneer of rigor.

For example, Luce Irigaray is criticised for asserting that E=mc2 is a "sexed equation" because "it privileges the speed of light over other speeds that are vitally necessary to us"; and for asserting that fluid mechanics is unfairly neglected because it deals with "feminine" fluids in contrast to "masculine" rigid mechanics.

[brendan]

http://www.allenandunwin.com/default.aspx?page=305&book=9781741755220

[Eriny]

they do have a point.

Yes they might, but the points/analyses are not very insightful, and they could have made the same point with a lot less words, and with a lot less obscure words at that. This was most evident to me when I was studying Legal Theory. Once you did understand their jargon, you realized that the author wasn't saying much of substance at all.

That's true. To some extent, the idea of academic authority makes people think that convoluted writing is the way to go. It usually isn't, but perhaps the most difficult accomplishment for a writer is finding clarity (at least, that's what I'm finding, personally) and also trying to avoid falling in love with one's own writing.

[brendan]

I agree with that. Economics Prof Robert Frank argued that academics  often use convoluted writing unnecessarily because of the incentives they face i.e. in terms of promotion and "looking erudite" in front of their peers.

[Collin Li]

Out of curiosity, does anyone think my arguments are filled with more fluff than substance? Personally, I think I have a lot of substance, but the articulation may not be very good (so it may appear as fluff). Every sentence I write means something, and I rarely include words that "pad" out a sentence.

[brendan]

Out of curiosity, does anyone think my arguments are filled with more fluff than substance? Personally, I think I have a lot of substance, but the articulation may not be very good (so it may appear as fluff). Every sentence I write means something, and I rarely include words that "pad" out a sentence.

Given my own interest in economics, I may not be the best judge, but a good test is:
Given your audience, can you write the same thing in less words without losing the meaning?

[Eriny]

Out of curiosity, does anyone think my arguments are filled with more fluff than substance? Personally, I think I have a lot of substance, but the articulation may not be very good (so it may appear as fluff). Every sentence I write means something, and I rarely include words that "pad" out a sentence.

It's clear enough. I think you get the point across usually without needing any clarification. But when I read your posts I'm not really thinking about how well you are expressing yourself, I'm thinking about what you're actually saying. The two are linked, so clearly you don't have so much fluff that it gets in the way of the crux of your posts.

I think I probably lack clarity, especially on a forum where I'm not refining or editing what I say, but also more generally.

[bturville]

Oh god I love Richard Dawkins:

"But a philosopher who is caught equating the erectile organ to the square root of minus one has, for my money, blown his credentials when it comes to things that I don't know anything about."