Why is Academic Writing So *Needlessly *Ridiculous?

[Spoken]

Not a fan of Ricoeur either

I've been meaning to read some Merleau-Ponty, have read some second-hand stuff but never read any of his writings.

Visible and the Invisible or Phenomenology of Perception. Dig in, son!

 

[Rimbaud82]

Visible and the Invisible or Phenomenology of Perception. Dig in, son!

Yep I was gonna start with Phenomenology of Perception

 

[Spoken]

Yep I was gonna start with Phenomenology of Perception

those are the only two I've read (sections of other stuff, perhaps).
Im sure there is some helpful secondary lit to frame a given work. Lots of good MP stuff out there now. I find MP really hard, but really fun

 

[Luminosity]

Levinas is interesting stuff. Are you teaching anywhere? I know philosophy jobs are rough (better than religion), but still....
Levinas, though difficult, is far easier than Derrida and the like, imo. Some of it might be that his construal of ethics isnt super complex from 5,000 feet up and that it's the gritty details that are tough? He also just might be more lucid. Havent read him in some time.

Yeah, teaching in Australia. Won't go into too much detail as it will reveal my identity but I actually come from the Visual Arts field which led me into philosophy. My specialisation is in Post Colonial art which led me to investigate notions of the Other in philosophy. Levinas was a very interesting learning curve for me as I didn't have a background in philosophy apart from a few general classes as an undergrad doing general ed. Levinas was hard for me at the beginning but he approaches an idea through repetition and different approaches in an almost poetic sense so if you don't get it at first you get a chance to pick it up from a different angle. I find his ideas fascinating in that the Other for him is irreducible to comprehension, which has great implications on colonial representations of the Other through fields like Anthropology and such, as well as reductive notions like stereotypes. For Levinas the Other is always more than what one can ascribe to them, which is very interesting from the perspective of representation.

 

[Rimbaud82]

Yeah, teaching in Australia. Won't go into too much detail as it will reveal my identity but I actually come from the Visual Arts field which led me into philosophy. My specialisation is in Post Colonial art which led me to investigate notions of the Other in philosophy. Levinas was a very interesting learning curve for me as I didn't have a background in philosophy apart from a few general classes as an undergrad doing general ed. Levinas was hard for me at the beginning but he approaches an idea through repetition and different approaches in an almost poetic sense so if you don't get it at first you get a chance to pick it up from a different angle. I find his ideas fascinating in that the Other for him is irreducible to comprehension, which has great implications on colonial representations of the Other through fields like Anthropology and such, as well as reductive notions like stereotypes. For Levinas the Other is always more than what one can ascribe to them, which is very interesting from the perspective of representation.

Have you read any Martin Buber? You might find his book I-and-Thou interesting if you haven't already.

I have read a little bit of Levinas (a few excerpts here and there), but I was really interested in what I heard through this podcast episode -

Episode 146: Emmanuel Levinas on Overcoming Solitude

https://partiallyexaminedlife.com/2016/09/05/ep146-1-levinas/

 

[Luminosity]

Have you read any Martin Buber? You might find his book I-and-Thou interesting if you haven't already.

I have read a little bit of Levinas (a few excerpts here and there), but I was really interested in what I heard through this podcast episode -

Episode 146: Emmanuel Levinas on Overcoming Solitude

https://partiallyexaminedlife.com/2016/09/05/ep146-1-levinas/

No I haven't read Buber but will check it out.

 

[Rimbaud82]

No I haven't read Buber but will check it out.

I definitely think you'd find it interesting. Like Levinas, Buber's philosophy is rooted in Jewish religious language/concepts. His core philosophical investigation is that of the encounter between the self (I) and the Other, the kind of encounters which make up existence as a whole (the I is basically defined by these encounters with the Other)...in most cases this takes the form of what he calls an I-It relationship, where the Other is objectified. In the best case scenario however, Buber thinks this should take the form of the I-Thou relationship, a pure encounter where the Other is experienced directly in itself.

It's a bit more literary/religiously inspired than more conventional philosophy, but worth a read definitely. It sounds like mysticism, but it's not quite that either, Buber had dabbled with that when he was younger but by the time he wrote I and Thou he had moved away from it. He still advocated dualism and didn't like philosophies which he seen as advocating the annihilation/subsummation of the self into a universal (as mystics would). I am no expert of course, have just read it once, but I found it fascinating.

 

[xhaydenx]

Other than game design books, most academic texts I had to study in Uni were like this. In the Philosophy and Social Economics books it was the worst. They can spend saying something that could've taken them 5 paragraphs. It's just incredibly obnoxious.

 

[Rimbaud82]

Other than game design books, most academic texts I had to study in Uni were like this. In the Philosophy and Social Economics books it was the worst. They can spend saying something that could've taken them 5 paragraphs. It's just incredibly obnoxious.

Can you give an example of what you mean? Ideally with a shortened account?

I just feel like a lot of people parrot this line, without actually giving much in the way of examples. Of course there are some overly dense texts, but they are the minority.

 

[Renard]

It depends a lot on the subject. Anything that's a "wishy washy" field e.g. literature, theology, philosophy, sociology, will often go into a highly subjective direction of meaningless interpretations and tangents, and studied as though they were real - which they're not. It's like science for religious people. I can't stand it, don't ask me to study something that has no foundations whatsoever and no use of the scientific method; I can think of morality and philosophy in my free time - I don't need anyone to teach me their viewpoint as though it mattered. Thankfully the people who go into these useless fields probably end up as teachers, there are no jobs for the useless shit they do.

 

[Tycho- Taylor's Version]

Learn yourself something here about objectivity, you postmodern heathen

Haha, I'm not saying they're the conclusions you should ultimately land on, but if you approached some naive person and explained them with some supporting evidence, they'd be forced to at least consider them.

I've never gotten the hate for Žižek's writing. I get hating Žižek's shtick, his public persona, but the writing itself - particularly Looking Awry, The Parallax View, and Less than Nothing - is top-notch. What's difficult about reading Žižek is that he's read everyone and everything, so he'll string together references and allusions and quotes to 14 things in a single paragraph - or a single sentence! - and that can seem overwhelming. But it's not an indictment of academic writing and it's not even a stylistic problem. He's just dropping Lacan and Hegel and Kierkegaard and Schiller and Wittgenstein and Hitchcock and then he's off to another point to discuss Descartes and Kant and Benjamin and Weininger and film noir and then he's off to another point and on and on like that.

It does feel like intellectual sprints, and if you don't know what he's referencing then of course you're not going to know what he's talking about. But I don't think he's a good example of the general line of critique of this thread regarding the ills of academic writing.

The political Žižek is the only Žižek that I don't read. I mean, the dude loves Marx, Lenin, and Mao. I'd certainly hope that no one takes his political shit seriously

Yea I only used Zizek as an example because I've had some recent exposure to his writing and then encountered that criticism that seemed to back up my impressions of it. I believe I have my ex's old copy of The Sublime Object of Ideology stuffed into the back of a bookshelf somewhere, never opened.

Zizek is free to use all the references he wants, but like I mentioned earlier, it's one thing if the purpose of his writing is to string ideas together for fun and another if he's trying to make a meaningful philosophical, psychological, or political contribution. There also seems to be a significant amount of resistance from specialists in the frameworks he attempts to employ, leading me to believe he's taking some creative liberties in piecing them all together.

It's a distinction that reminds me of why psychoanalysis is popular is literary criticism yet shunned by scientific psychology. Powerful explanatory frameworks are seductive, but they're next to useless when can't do the work of proving themselves in the real world.

That said, I was never going to get along with a Marxist psychoanalyst for predictable reasons . I just really like (I think) his film stuff.

 

[Tycho- Taylor's Version]

By its very nature, postmodernism can be subjectively interpreted to be anything the writer/reader decides it to be.

I sympathize with the direction of this criticism, but it's not 100% true. Postmodernism can't be interpreted as premodernism, or modernism, for example. As often as its proponents speak in self-undermining nonsense language, that's a distinction they're forced to maintain.

So immediately there's a rejection of objective reason and empirical evidence in favor of subjective rationalization and, ultimately, total rejection of objective knowledge/truth. That's fine when applied to the inherently subjective arenas of art, culture, philosophy, etc but it's not an appropriate mode of analysis for science or mathematics or logic (or any of their derivative disciplines i.e. econometrics, accounting, law, etc)

Right, and here's where the undermining does become a serious issue. That said - and you hear this critique of relativism all the time - it could be the case that the only definitely true thing is that nothing else is definitely true.

It reeks of special pleading, but you can't know if science is really just another arbitrary "way of knowing" until you've pushed that idea to the limit, which is part of the postmodern endeavor imo.

The serious ideas you refer to regarding critique of objective value and capitalism are indeed serious, but these ideas have already been coherently identified and explored as philosophical concepts by existentialists and nihilists, among others. And whereas existential and nihilist thought eventually produced branching belief systems such as absurdism and dialectical materialsim which address value and capitalism on a philosophical level, postmodernism often devolves into employing obscurantism in the application of subjective abstractions to concrete subjects

I really just don't see the necessity for or usefulness of postmodernism today

Similarly useful ideas have emerged from postmodernism, though I agree that its inability to construct a genuine framework (a result of the inherent rejection of frameworks) is a weakness. That said, ideology is a useful concept. Social-conditioning is useful to know about in principle, even if it's often over-stretched. Deconstruction is useful.

I kind of think of postmoderism like guerilla philosophy. It's really good at taking pot shots at central modernist concepts and then retreating back into the dark, but it would threaten its own existence by transforming into a true state militia.

How useful that is to you depends on your circumstances.

 

[Lubaolong]

Pretentious writing that prefers extravagant, over-flowery language in the place of concise, clearly understood words seems to be more unique to the humanities and soft-sciences. What is the point of writing? To sound smart and impress other insecure people, or so someone can understand what you're trying to communicate? Choose words thoughtfully and write concisely. Otherwise, you'll end up with shit that's unnecessarily confusing and annoying to the audience.

 

[Rimbaud82]

I sympathize with the direction of this criticism, but it's not 100% true. Postmodernism can't be interpreted as premodernism, or modernism, for example. As often as its proponents speak in self-undermining nonsense language, that's a distinction they're forced to maintain.



Right, and here's where the undermining does become a serious issue. That said - and you hear this critique of relativism all the time - it could be the case that the only definitely true thing is that nothing else is definitely true.

It reeks of special pleading, but you can't know if science is really just another arbitrary "way of knowing" until you've pushed that idea to the limit, which is part of the postmodern endeavor imo.



Similarly useful ideas have emerged from postmodernism, though I agree that its inability to construct a genuine framework (a result of the inherent rejection of frameworks) is a weakness. That said, ideology is a useful concept. Social-conditioning is useful to know about in principle, even if it's often over-stretched. Deconstruction is useful.

I kind of think of postmoderism like guerilla philosophy. It's really good at taking pot shots at central modernist concepts and then retreating back into the dark, but it would threaten its own existence by transforming into a true state militia.

How useful that is to you depends on your circumstances.

That's basically how I view post-modernism as well. There are useful insights and techniques to be gleaned from post-modernist thinkers, but taking it too far brings you to an unsettling kind of relativism. Equally though, the term has become little more than a buzz-word (closely linked to cultural marxism, which is obviously utter nonsense) for those who want to denounce any kind of ideas or concepts they don't agree with on the "The Left".

 

[Bullitt68]

Yea I only used Zizek as an example because I've had some recent exposure to his writing and then encountered that criticism that seemed to back up my impressions of it. I believe I have my ex's old copy of The Sublime Object of Ideology stuffed into the back of a bookshelf somewhere, never opened.

The Sublime Object of Ideology isn't bad by any stretch - in fact, it's probably his best predominantly political text.

Zizek is free to use all the references he wants, but like I mentioned earlier, it's one thing if the purpose of his writing is to string ideas together for fun and another if he's trying to make a meaningful philosophical, psychological, or political contribution.

I think the "I'm just fucking around" shit is shtick, I think it's a persona that he didn't shrug off and a criticism that he can't be bothered to refute.

There also seems to be a significant amount of resistance from specialists in the frameworks he attempts to employ, leading me to believe he's taking some creative liberties in piecing them all together.

A big part of that is jealousy/ego-based resentment. That's not to say that critiques leveled by specialists are always spurious - for example, David Bordwell's critical response to Žižek's book The Fright of Real Tears is fucking ruthless - but I often find that critical responses to Žižek amount to throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

(And I swear I'm not just saying this because I'm a biased tool who's published an essay in The International Journal of Žižek Studies )

It's a distinction that reminds me of why psychoanalysis is popular is literary criticism yet shunned by scientific psychology. Powerful explanatory frameworks are seductive, but they're next to useless when can't do the work of proving themselves in the real world.

This is my position on poststructuralism: That it's philosophically invalid but hermeneutically valid. And, in a recent essay of mine, in order to make this point about poststructuralism, I cite the film scholar Malcolm Turvey, who once made the exact point that you're making about psychoanalysis:

"The way psychoanalysis is used [is] for the most part … as a theory that generates interpretations. People will look at a Hitchcock film or a David Lynch film and say, 'You can interpret this film through psychoanalytic theory.' You can, for example, interpret the behavior of a character as being motivated by unconscious desires or impulses. I see no problem with this because there are certain films and works of art that lend themselves very easily to psychoanalytic interpretation. And that's no surprise, because the psychoanalytical view of human nature, broadly speaking, is one shared by many artists, and therefore they will design works in which characters have unconscious desires … It's more problematic to me to say that psychoanalysis is true as a theory of mind and mentality … That seems to be a much more problematic enterprise."

That said, I was never going to get along with a Marxist psychoanalyst for predictable reasons . I just really like (I think) his film stuff.

I sympathize with the direction of this criticism, but it's not 100% true. Postmodernism can't be interpreted as premodernism, or modernism, for example. As often as its proponents speak in self-undermining nonsense language, that's a distinction they're forced to maintain.

Because of that "self-undermining nonsense language," though, it would be more accurate to say that postmodernists can't refute interpretations of postmodernism as premodernism or modernism. To refute someone's characterization of something presupposes knowledge on the part of the refuter as to what that something is...but to talk of what things are is to talk using "metaphysical" language, and Derrida destroyed "Western metaphysics," so true/false, right/wrong, good/bad, that shit doesn't fly anymore. We've "deconstructed" such "metaphysical" notions and we've decided that they're undecidable.

It's such a fucking con job. But boy oh boy is it something to behold if you get a postmodernist/poststructuralist to go on and on about how true/false, right/wrong, good/bad, etc. are "undecidable" and then say something to them that makes their skin crawl (like "Barthes is bad" or "Marx was wrong") and that they immediately lash out at you for saying because it's so obviously - so decidably - false/wrong/bad.

If I felt that someone I was talking to was genuinely ignorant but also genuinely curious, then I'd take the time to explain why that bullshit is bullshit, but in my dealings with "true believers," I'd sometimes treat them the way that Peter treated his company suck-up and just twist them up in contradictions until their heads exploded

Deconstruction is useful.

 

[Rimbaud82]

@Spoken it must be a sign, I was reading the TLS this evening and what do I see an advert for:

 

[deviake]

The man interviewing Chomsky, Michael Albert, had a lot of insightful criticisms of leftist elitism and leftist echo-chambers.

Here is some audio of Michael Albert criticizing radical lefties during one of his talks. He points out that radical leftists will not change the world by hanging out in echo-chambers and mocking the working class. He said there has to be an effort to reach out to people who drink at a sports-bars and watch football.



@3:05 "Our (radical leftist) movements try to aspire to be like Yale Law School more than they aspire to be a place where normal people will be empowered and will be comfortable."

I come from a working class background myself, and I recall my labour history professor being a complete wanker. First off he wasn’t politically active at all. In Canada we have two left wing parties and he had plenty of opportunity to volunteer or organize for them but obviously never would. Let alone talking to people in a union hall...
This guy romanticized people who he didn’t associate with, who came from a culture he looked down on and considered racist/sexist/whatever because of the curses working class people use.

I’m not saying every professor has to be an activist like Chomsky but it wouldn’t hurt to actually try to respect and understand people as though they were more than fictional characters...

Holy shit, thanks for the posts. Great watches/reads. I wasn't familiar with Michael Albert but that will be changing quickly.



This is an interesting thread.

 

[Tycho- Taylor's Version]

(And I swear I'm not just saying this because I'm a biased tool who's published an essay in The International Journal of Žižek Studies )

^ my irl reaction. God, you of all people.

This is my position on poststructuralism: That it's philosophically invalid but hermeneutically valid. And, in a recent essay of mine, in order to make this point about poststructuralism, I cite the film scholar Malcolm Turvey, who once made the exact point that you're making about psychoanalysis:

"The way psychoanalysis is used [is] for the most part … as a theory that generates interpretations. People will look at a Hitchcock film or a David Lynch film and say, 'You can interpret this film through psychoanalytic theory.' You can, for example, interpret the behavior of a character as being motivated by unconscious desires or impulses. I see no problem with this because there are certain films and works of art that lend themselves very easily to psychoanalytic interpretation. And that's no surprise, because the psychoanalytical view of human nature, broadly speaking, is one shared by many artists, and therefore they will design works in which characters have unconscious desires … It's more problematic to me to say that psychoanalysis is true as a theory of mind and mentality … That seems to be a much more problematic enterprise."

Any chance you could cite that Turney quote? I definitely need to read it in context.

I'm on a psychoanalysis binge post-Peterson, and I want to love it so much, but it's just bad. So bad I'm at a loss to understand how it survives. This thread was pretty timely.

 

[Bullitt68]

^ my irl reaction. God, you of all people.

The dude's my OG theorist. One of the first thinkers who got me hooked on thinking. I disagree with plenty of shit that he says, but he says so much that that doesn't really matter, because I also agree with plenty of shit that he says. In particular, there's no better exponent of Lacan (who I'll always have a soft spot for), there's no one who's turned over more rocks in the Hitchcock canon, and there's no one else who can make Hegel palatable (if I try Hegel cut with anyone other than Žižek, it's torture, and if I try Hegel uncut, it makes me contemplate suicide).

When I was an undergrad, I took a Hitchcock class and wrote a Žižek-inspired Lacanian tract on Spellbound, Notorious, Vertigo, and Marnie. I still stand by the position of and the insights in the essay, but, in the spirit of this thread, it's my most ostentatiously written piece. If I have an out, it's that it was a conscious choice on my part as a youngin to see what it'd be like to write like that. But there are no two ways about it: I went full pompous doofus for that one

Any chance you could cite that *Turney quote?

*Turvey. It's from a 2013 interview that he did for an open access Canadian film journal called Synoptique. You can find the article homepage here and you can download the full PDF of the interview here.

I'm on a psychoanalysis binge post-Peterson, and I want to love it so much, but it's just bad. So bad I'm at a loss to understand how it survives.

Bad in what sense? Psychology is your world, not mine, so I'd be interested to hear what you're working your way through.

 

[xhaydenx]

Can you give an example of what you mean? Ideally with a shortened account?

I just feel like a lot of people parrot this line, without actually giving much in the way of examples. Of course there are some overly dense texts, but they are the minority.

I don't have any of those text books nor do I really keep up with that stuff. I just had to do it in uni as part of my video game design course.

I just remember reading so many damn passages of text where I was like, "Fuck. This could've been so much shorter and still gotten across the exact same point just as well."

I've got a background in writing though, and I was always pretty big on editing, so maybe I'm being a bit harsh on it.