Poking through the comments following this, I rediscovered a quote from an essay by Roger Scruton, first published in the New Criterion, February 2003. He’s talking about the Paris riots of 1968, but readers may spot some connection with the sentiment of this.

That evening a friend came round: she had been all day on the barricades with a troupe of theatre people, under the captainship of Armand Gatti. She was very excited by the events, which Gatti, a follower of Antonin Artaud, had taught her to regard as the high point of situationist theatre – the artistic transfiguration of an absurdity which is the day-to-day meaning of bourgeois life. Great victories had been scored: policemen injured, cars set alight, slogans chanted, graffiti daubed. The bourgeoisie were on the run and soon the Old Fascist and his régime would be begging for mercy…

What, I asked, do you propose to put in the place of this “bourgeoisie” whom you so despise, and to whom you owe the freedom and prosperity that enable you to play on your toy barricades? What vision of France and its culture compels you? And are you prepared to die for your beliefs, or merely to put others at risk in order to display them?

…She replied with a book: Foucault’s Les Mots et les Choses, the bible of the soixante-huitards, the text which seemed to justify every form of transgression, by showing that obedience is merely defeat. It is an artful book, composed with a satanic mendacity, selectively appropriating facts in order to show that culture and knowledge are nothing but the “discourses” of power. The book is not a work of philosophy but an exercise in rhetoric. Its goal is subversion, not truth, and it is careful to argue – by the old nominalist sleight of hand that was surely invented by the Father of Lies – that “truth” requires inverted commas, that it changes from epoch to epoch, and is tied to the form of consciousness, the “episteme,” imposed by the class which profits from its propagation. The revolutionary spirit, which searches the world for things to hate, has found in Foucault a new literary formula. Look everywhere for power, he tells his readers, and you will find it. Where there is power there is oppression. And where there is oppression there is the right to destroy. In the street below my window was the translation of that message into deeds.

Related: Rebellion, Foucault’s Suit, Foucault and the Ayatollah, A Romantic Hostility. (h/t, pst314)

12 Glowing Men. Still angry, but now glowing. (h/t, Coudal.) // The Microsoft Surface Sphere. // Unnecessary knowledge. // The musical Pikachu. Oh, you’ll never tire of that. // Social skills 101 for Japan’s hikikomori. // A keyboard without keys. // Meet Gore-Al. // When galaxies collide (2). // The 50 megaton Tsar Bomba. “Its enormous size made the bomb impractical for warfare purposes.” (h/t, Things.) // Soviet atomic weapons tests. // Filmed effects of atomic weapons. // Details of warp drive remain somewhat sketchy. Requires energy equivalent to entire mass of Jupiter. // At last, the jetpack. // Zoom with Motorola. They’re saving the world. // Fallen. A meteor’s tale. // Beluga whales and bubble rings. // Guardian hypocrisy shock #37. // The periodic table of videos. // The periodic coffee table. // The table is melting. (h/t, Artblog.) // An archive of magazine first issue covers. // Heather MacDonald on maths and gender. // The political correctness of academic disciplines. // And, via The Thin Man, it’s Mr Fats Waller.

Thanks to The Thin Man, here’s the 2007 documentary, In the Shadow of the Moon, in which the surviving Apollo crew members recount their remarkable, and at times moving, experiences. There’s previously unseen mission footage, an excellent score by Philip Sheppard, and keep an eye out for Kennedy’s extraordinary speech, about 13:20 in.

The film is also available in six parts here. Related: Freefall, Craters, Astronomical Odds. 

Eye magazine now has a blog. Readers with an interest in graphic design and visual culture should pay a visit. Items there include my review of the Advanced Beauty exhibition. 

Some time ago, I wrote: 

The more sceptical among us might suspect that the unintelligible nature of much postmodern ‘analysis’ is a convenient contrivance, if only because it’s difficult to determine exactly how wrong an unintelligible analysis is.

With that in mind, a reader, Todd Lemmon, has steered my attention to this post by Rick Hills on obscurantism and being “anti-intellectual”:

I am most certainly an anti-intellectual… Being anti-intellectual is not the same as being anti-intellect. My beef is with a particular social class – the “intelligentsia” – and not with the practice of using one’s intellect to reflect on experience. In my experience, intellectuals (as a class) are ideologically intolerant, easily offended by ordinary humour, and pretentious in their prejudices, which they disguise as universal truths. Moreover, I find a direct relationship between the academic obscurity of self-consciously “intellectual” writer’s prose and the willingness of that writer to justify the unjustifiable.

It takes the convoluted abstractions of a Carl Schmitt or a Heidegger to offer apologetics for Hitler; a Sartre, to temporize about Stalin; a Foucault, to defend Khomeini. In this respect, I stand with George Orwell who spent the 1930s and 1940s denouncing the obscurity of intellectuals’ prose as a cloak for tyranny (and, incidentally, who was also accused of being an anti-intellectual). Intellectuals spray polysyllables like squid ink, to evade the democratic decencies of conversation. I’d like not to be one of their number.

I am aware of, but never have been persuaded by, various efforts to justify the deliberate obscurity of intellectuals. Pierre Bourdieu, for instance, offered a defence of academic obscurity in the introduction to his book, Distinction. Alas, it was too obscure for me to understand. Instead, I tended to think that the rest of Bourdieu’s book provided a better account of the social function of academic obscurity: Obscurity is what Bourdieu dubs “cultural capital”. It is akin to knowing to wear white shoes only before Labour Day or which jazz CDs to play at a Upper West Side academic party – a sort of union card that one can flash for admission to a privileged class.

Judith Butler offered a defence of her obscurity in the New York Times, in which she argued that obscure prose was necessary to get outside of the oppression built into ordinary language. But she gave no examples of instances in which her prose served such a function, and I remain sceptical. Her standard argument that gender bias is built into language can, I think, be communicated effectively without the name-dropping and byzantine insider jokes that are (again, my view or prejudice) the hallmarks of Butler’s style. I tend to think that simple questions simply asked a la Socrates can unveil much more incoherence and oppression in ordinary social conventions that any numbers of references to “hegemonic discourses” and the rest.

The whole thing.

For more on Judith Butler, see here and the comments following this.

Related: Derrida imparts his wisdom. And, of course, the extraordinary Professor Caroline Guertin.