The Prose, It Burns
Further to this, readers may be interested in Philosophy and Literature’s gone but not forgotten Annual Bad Writing Contest. The rules are simple enough:
The Bad Writing Contest attempts to locate the ugliest, most stylistically awful passage found in a scholarly book or article published in the last few years. Ordinary journalism, fiction, etc. are not eligible, nor are parodies: entries must be non-ironic, from actual serious academic journals or books.
The winning entries are, alas, not quite so clear. This, from 1997, is Professor Rob Wilson, writing in The Administration of Aesthetics: Censorship, Political Criticism, and the Public Sphere, a collection of essays published by the University of Minnesota Press and edited by Richard Burt:
If such a sublime cyborg would insinuate the future as post-Fordist subject, his palpably masochistic locations as ecstatic agent of the sublime superstate need to be decoded as the ‘now-all-but-unreadable DNA’ of a fast deindustrializing Detroit, just as his Robocop-like strategy of carceral negotiation and street control remains the tirelessly American one of inflicting regeneration through violence upon the racially heteroglossic wilds and others of the inner city.
The publisher’s blurb informs us that the purpose of the book quoted above is to “seek a deeper understanding of what ‘censorship’, ‘criticism’ and the ‘public sphere’ really mean.”
There’s more, of course. (h/t, Stephen Hicks.)
Let us not forget the Fifth Annual “Hatemonger’s Quarterly” Horrible College-Student Poetry Competition…
http://hatemongersquarterly.mu.nu/
And the postmodern essay generator…
http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo/
David,
Found this –
“The problem, finally, is not that academic writing is “ugly” and “stylistically awful.” It’s rather that bad academic writing conceals the political reality of the contemporary university. No longer defined by the common attachment to ordinary rational principles, they have become institutions of one-party rule. To canvass for this party is to promote your career; to dissent from it is to put your career at risk. Young scholars must conform in their writing – and pay a protection fee to the party bosses in the form of quoting them. […] In such a climate, the party leaders are effectively insulated from criticism. Philosophy and Literature’s Bad Writing Contest does, in fact, what [Judith] Butler and cohorts always claim (and fail) to do: criticise entrenched power in the name of community.
http://www-english.tamu.edu/pers/fac/myers/bad_writing.html
Anna,
Thanks for that.
“Much of the scholarship now published in the humanities… has no other purpose than to confirm the scholar’s own status and authority. It is not a contribution to knowledge, but to political power.”
In “Explaining Postmodernism”, Stephen Hicks argues that postmodern theorising is in large part a political comfort exercise – a reaction to a crisis of faith among the academic far left: “Its epistemology justifies a leap of faith necessary to continue believing in socialism, and… justifies using language not as a vehicle for seeking truth, but as a rhetorical weapon in the continuing battle against capitalism.”
See also the last few paragraphs of this: https://thompsonblog.co.uk/2007/02/art_bollocks_re.html
Ophelia Benson at B&W has commented on the sickly, farcical reverence that so often surrounds Theory’s supposed luminaries, despite – or because of – the awfulness of their work and its political leanings. And if you criticise The Greats™ or point out some error, there’s a good chance the response from the devout will be indignant and condescending but short on actual substance.
https://thompsonblog.co.uk/2007/02/pomo_terry_eagl_1.html
It seems to me that even when used carefully and in good faith much of the terminology and theoretical framing is still gratuitously technocratic and heavily loaded, not least politically. As far as I can make out, it adds little of value and presumes far too much; hence the general preference for neologism and bald assertion over formal argument. And given the apparent ease with which the most obvious and inexcusable flummery can pass unchallenged, even thrive, scepticism seems important. If the level of incompetence and charlatanism found in the “theory”-fixated humanities were present in other, more reputable, disciplines – say, physics and engineering – planes would be falling out of the sky on a weekly basis.
David,
“It seems to me that even when used carefully and in good faith much of the terminology and theoretical framing is still gratuitously technocratic and heavily loaded, not least politically. As far as I can make out, it adds little of value and presumes far too much; hence the general preference for neologism and bald assertion over formal argument. And given the apparent ease with which the most obvious and inexcusable flummery can pass unchallenged, even thrive, scepticism seems important.”
I suspect the true reason for such reliance on neologisms and obfuscatory terminology is to disguise the lack of any new thinking occurring in academe. This is nothing new, as most ideas in the humanities have already been thought by minds greater than those who seek to criticize them. Yet, why is it that those who sit in authority today seek to appear as if they are equal to, or even superior to, the likes of Aristotle, Kant, Aquinas, Plato, et al.? Why isn’t it sufficient to simply pass on the collected knowledge of our ancestors and educate one another? Does that not get one tenure and accolades?
Strange how my most cherished classes as an undergraduate have been those of the humanities in which the doors of classical and even modern thought have been opened wide. When I read some of this postmodernist claptrap it is as if those doors have slammed shut.
Also,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uz27HTFdkYE&NR=1
The goggles, they do nothing!
I’m trying to recall Wittgenstein’s final words in the Tractatus. “Anything that can be said at all can be said clearly. What cannot be said must be passed over in silence”.
I’m very much a fan of the philosopher John Searle, who manages to make quite arcane speculation feel simple. He says, “if you can’t say it simply, you don’t understand it yourself”.
I don’t think that left wingers always write badly while right wingers always write well. Orwell considered himself a leftie, and he always wrote clearly. The disgraced Tory, Jeffrey Archer, is a terrible writer.
As I’ve pointed out on these threads before, Noam Chomsky is a vigorous opponent of this kind of PoMo nonsense, and not even his PoMo enemies would call him right wing.
Georges,
“If you can’t say it simply, you don’t understand it yourself.”
Well, in terms of literary “theory”, a lack of clarity often suggests dishonesty, particularly when that “theory” is charged with social and political implications, which it usually is. There’s no shortage of literary theorists who merrily deconstruct texts until eventually, and conveniently, they can be said to support the theorists’ own sociopolitical preferences. These preferences are, curiously, very often quasi-Marxist in tone and supposedly “transgressive”. Which is to say, they’re intended to scandalise bourgeois sensibilities and attract a cultish following.
A common objective is not actually to fathom the author’s intention, but rather to advance the theorist’s own, often loaded, “interpretation” as at least equally valid and much more “relevant” and exciting. And academic politics tends to amplify this effect. There are only so many original papers that can be written about what a given author actually meant, which may be fairly obvious and not terribly exciting. But if meaning can be deemed sufficiently indefinite and malleable, then one can publish any number of “iconoclastic” books and papers and thereby advance one’s career within the postmodern priesthood. Besides generating a lot of awful and worthless material, this approach can have other, more serious, effects. Years of sleight-of-hand and taking liberties with meaning can blunt the critical senses and one’s sense of reality, perhaps irreparably.
Kingsley Amis once wrote that, when teaching at a university, he was often so annoyed by the papers his students submitted to him that he had considered getting a rubber stamp made up. Unless his students took the trouble to write clearly they would receive the paper back stamped with the words: “What does this mean, and why should I care?”
Perhaps this is over-simplistic, not to say curmudgeonly, but perhaps we should all order rubber stamps with this slogan, and use them. A lot.
I was thinking of something more emphatic, like fire. If only to prevent passages like the one below being hailed as profound and “skillfully poetic”.
https://thompsonblog.co.uk/2007/06/imparting_knowl.html
Ah yes. Fire…
Ridicule is better though (as you well know). In another thread I mentioned a song by Frank Zappa. Zappa also once set US immigration forms to music and the result was amusing and – in some way – instructive. Perhaps we should take these passages and set them to music and perform them on the South Bank, preferably with Arts Council funding.
When I say “passages like these” I mean of course “passages such as those under discussion here”. Not “passages such as the one I am now writing”, which of course have a simple nobility that is proof against any mockery or spoof.
Excellent notion, Horace! It could be billed as Rap, and thus get funding as crime-prevention for inner-city youths.