Posted on 11/29/2004 6:03:19 AM PST by jalisco555
In January 1999, when Philosophy and Literature announced that Rhetoric professor Judith Butler had won its fourth annual Bad Writing Contest, nobody was much surprised. Many had pointed out the solecisms of Butler, runner-up Homi Bhabha, and previous awardees, and the abstract, twisting grandiloquence of critical theory with a progressive slant was already well known in academic circles. But the contest did have an unusual fate outside the academy. It became news. Philosophy and Literature editor Denis Dutton wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal (February 5, 1999), a startling forum for the treatment of academic prose. Articles in the New York Times, the Weekly Standard, and Lingua Franca appeared, and the New Republic and Salon issued attacks on Butler's ideas as well as her sentences. That made for a readership of millions and another humiliation for educators (after the Sokal Hoax, History Standards, Ebonics . . .). The contest hit a popular nerve, gratifying not only formalist critics, empirical historians, and scientists—all of whom had been targets of theory discourse—but also journalists, public intellectuals, and informed readers who found the language and attitude of critical theory obnoxious and overblown. Indeed, so far as I know, not a single voice outside the academic theory [End Page 180] realm rose to defend the professors. Butler responded with an apologia for obscurity in the Times (March 20, 1999), and was in turn roundly criticized in the letters columns. A few observers denounced Dutton et al. as reactionary hacks (Marxist art historian T. J. Clark compared them in the Times to House Republicans bent on impeaching Clinton), but for the most part the contest's ridicule went unchallenged.
(Excerpt) Read more at press.jhu.edu ...
This, in rhetoric, is both an ad hominem and "poisoning the well."
I have rich respect for that which puts bread on my table. Enough respect to resent the grant-grubbers and the self-serving way they employ the English language.
I caught that too. What does it mean? That women and minorities must be spoken to using incomprehensible jargon or that you are too dumb to understand your condition and must be led like children by your betters? The latter, I suspect.
Actually, I think critics have a duty to make their ideas comprehensible to all. I have sometimes felt at a loss at conventions with the decontructivist poststructuralist jargon all around me. Do these writers even understand each other?
I can't speak about conventions but at faculty parties I often observe grad students being harangued by their profs. The poor students nod sagely but have a glazed expression that tells me they aren't hearing (or understanding) a thing that's being said to them.
When I teach a course in art criticism, we have a great time derailing some of this theory. It seems the simpler the art work, especially minimal sculpture, the more complex the argument for it.
Another one of my pet peeves has been the attack on beauty in art by much of the academy. Art criticism is another field contaminated by revolutionary fervor and jargon. That being said, I'm looking forward to going to the reopened MOMA.
Doesn't this sloppy writing just show the dead-end thinking of liberals?
Sure does.
That sentence makes perfect sense to me.
My name is old3030 and I am a unix geek.
LOL. Yeah, but just saying "Waahhhh!" isn't enough to get you tenured at Berkely.
I just wish journalism schools would teach how to write a news article that is clear and understandable.
If it contains the word "hegemony", somewhere in there is a hate-America message.
I don't think I get to enough parties.
The trick for me is to host them. That way when I get bored or tired I just go upstairs and watch TV. Or hang out with the other non-academic spouses.
This is the perfect example of the highly educated idiot.
As someone in rhetoric and communication studies, I can tell you that the introductory textbooks do their best to simplify these theories, and also to make them seem more logical then they truly are. If they weren't politically useful (at least to the left, but I'm sure the fringe right would find them useful as well), they wouldn't have any currency at all.
I think I spotted a "hegemony" in those brambles.
"Hegemony":that's marrying with a prenuptial contract, as compared to "matrimony," which is unconditional.
in which capital (References to "capital" mean "Waaahh! It's unfair that people make millions for making stuff people want when I only get a professor's salary and I'm so much smarter.")
"Capital" is the basis of this author's conception of social relations. Specifically, it refers to her cousin, who screwed up all through high school,and after managing two years at community college snagged a job with some retail outfit. Now it's all she hears about from her mother, "your cousin X this," she says and "your cousin x's new house" and "his lovely wife Xess, and "your cousin took me out to dinner in his new Mercedes..." and on and on.
The Scholar's soliloquy: "Within two years of starting the little turd was an assistant manager pulling almost 70 thou a year, not including benefits. He took up golf. Golf. And then he met the V.P., you know, playing golf, and now he sends me post cards from Fiji or some damn place where he's playing, you guessed it, golf with his big wheel buddies and drinking single-malt scotch, simultaneously. I get these post cards in the dead of winter while I'm freezing my ass off in this miserable city where I teach these little zombies six hours a week and spend 12 in meetings."
"I wrote poetry, studied and sucked up, my teachers called me 'gifted.' He screwed around and played baseball, that little philistine (whoops, shouldn't have said that...)"
That's all the time I have at the moment, but this is a deep well. All are invited to participate in this exegesis.
LOL! That's brilliant!
I'm too tired at the moment to add to your exegesis, but perhaps tomorrow.
Ever thought of writing a satirical novel? I think you'd be good at it.
If, for a while, the ruse of desire is calculable for the uses of discipline soon the repetition of guilt, justification, pseudo-scientific theories, superstition, spurious authorities, and classifications can be seen as the desperate effort to “normalize” formally the disturbance of a discourse of splitting that violates the rational, enlightened claims of its enunciatory modality.
As my story is an august tale of fathers and sons, real and imagined, the biography here will fitfully attend to the putative traces in Manet’s work of “les noms du père,” a Lacanian romance of the errant paternal phallus (“Les Non-dupes errent”), a revised Freudian novella of the inferential dynamic of paternity which annihilates (and hence enculturates) through the deferred introduction of the third term of insemination the phenomenologically irreducible dyad of the mother and child.
Total presence breaks on the univocal predication of the exterior absolute the absolute existent (of that of which it is not possible to univocally predicate an outside, while the equivocal predication of the outside of the absolute exterior is possible of that of which the reality so predicated is not the reality, viz., of the dark/of the self, the identity of which is not outside the absolute identity of the outside, which is to say that the equivocal predication of identity is possible of the self-identity which is not identity, while identity is univocally predicated of the limit to the darkness, of the limit of the reality of the self). This is the real exteriority of the absolute outside: the reality of the absolutely unconditioned absolute outside univocally predicated of the dark: the light univocally predicated of the darkness: the shining of the light univocally predicated of the limit of the darkness: actuality univocally predicated of the other of self-identity: existence univocally predicated of the absolutely unconditioned other of the self. The precision of the shining of the light breaking the dark is the other-identity of the light. The precision of the absolutely minimum transcendence of the dark is the light itself/the absolutely unconditioned exteriority of existence for the first time/the absolutely facial identity of existence/the proportion of the new creation sans depth/the light itself ex nihilo: the dark itself univocally identified, i.e., not self-identity identity itself equivocally, not the dark itself equivocally, in “self-alienation,” not “self-identity, itself in self-alienation” “released” in and by “otherness,” and “actual other,” “itself,” not the abysmal inversion of the light, the reality of the darkness equivocally, absolute identity equivocally predicated of the self/selfhood equivocally predicated of the dark (the reality of this darkness the other-self-covering of identity which is the identification person-self).
Wow...
My best guess is that it means "I am SO stoned, dude!"
lol!
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