A Puffing of Chests
When it comes to the less reputable quarters of academia, you’re a cold-hearted, cynical bunch. Oh, don’t deny it. Some of you chuckled wickedly at that mistress of limpid prose Dr Caroline Guertin and her Quantum Feminist Mnemotechnics. Some of you managed to turn the infinite nuance of artistic theory into bawdy comedy. Others somehow found amusement in Professor Sharra Vostral’s musings on the politics of menstruation and her discovery that the humble tampon is “an artefact of control.”
I mean, really. You people are such heathens.
It’s with some trepidation, then, that I share the latest find by TDK and Mr William Briggs – Stuff Academics Like, a compendium of curios from our Towers Of Learning. One of its regular features is the Guessing Game series, where readers are invited to ponder a list of imposing conference papers and lecture titles in order to fathom which of them is the imposter. Below are a few contenders from a recent list, only one of which is officially hokum. Feel free to take a shot.
Binary Poetics and Ecology in Battlestar Galactica.
The Support Belt Fetish: An Example of Psychoanalysis.
Antagonistic Corpo-Real-ities.
Turtle Times: The Cross-Generational Cult Text of Turtles Forever and Gendered Readings.
Not sure? How about,
The True History of His Beard: Joaquin Phoenix and the Boundaries of Cinéma Vérité.
Or,
Exemplarity – The Real: Some Problems of a Realist Exemplarity Exposed through the Channel of an Aesthetic Autopoeisis.
Or could it be,
Alan Ball’s True Blood Antics: Queering the Southern Vampire…?
Nope. They’re all actual contributions to the broadening of our minds and the swelling of the culture.
The imposter, of course, is,
Guattari and the Onomatopoeic Imperative: Decentering the Archaeologies of the Speech-Act.
Which is obvious now that I’ve pointed it out. Oh, there’s more.
Surely all of them are phoney…?
“Surely all of them are phoney…?”
Well, they do exist.
And I won’t have any laughing. This is vital intellectual work.
Dr Caroline Guertin: ooh, she really is a keeper isn’t she, total and utter fraud, but a keeper. Looks the way you would expect her to as well.
Reading that teaching statement of hers linked to above is surprising. The woman is a polymath that seems to be across just about every area of human knowledge available. I wonder how they act when a mathematician is around and starts quizzing them on the relevance of the choice of Hilbert space versus say a Banach space. And exactly what metric they are using etc etc.
The higher education bubble is obviously a myth.
To be fair credit should go to Mr Briggs http://wmbriggs.com/blog/?p=3586
TDK,
Post updated to include the missing credit.
This is why the best use of a PhD in the humanities is for wrapping burgers in.
Jesus, the Brown Skinned Revolutionary: Was Jesus a Marxist Rapper?
Er, no?
Phew. That was easy.
“The higher education bubble is obviously a myth.”
Heh. Yes, there’s quite a lot of fat on that bacon. Some studies suggest that the overwhelming majority of humanities scholarship goes uncited or unread. Given the examples above and others in the archives, that figure isn’t especially surprising.
I’ve nothing against pondering pop cultural trivia per se, but as a measure of intellectual merit it’s cheap currency. And I’m not sure that lengthy and pretentious speculation about Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (for instance) has much of a commercial application either. Is it a skill that many employers crave? I mean, what are the employment prospects – beyond spending one’s life in the Clown Quarter of the humanities, possibly at public expense, and inflicting the same hokey noodling on other students?
Frank: I wonder how they act when a mathematician is around and starts quizzing them on the relevance of the choice of Hilbert space versus say a Banach space. And exactly what metric they are using etc etc.
you think they would let a mathematician in the room, let alone finish such a question?
These kinds of events are purely a self-reinforcing closed shop for self-congratulation. There is no dissent, for to express such dissent would indicate lack of understanding, even though objectively there is nothing to understand.
To be brutally honest, I struggle to understand this kind of “scholarship” when starting from a presumption of good intentions on the part of the “scholars”. It gets easier to understand when one is cynical, and presumes a combination of intellectual insecurity and a desire to justify one’s salary and position in the faculty with publication volume.
Somebody more eloquent than me once described the pomo writing style as something along the lines of conflating impenetrability of prose with intelligence. Hence, the more impenetrable and nonsensical the piece, the more intelligent the author must be, and it proves how ignorant the reader is because he or she cannot understand it.
“Good jobs for Philosophers, too!”
— Firesign Theatre, 1980
Fred,
“…a combination of intellectual insecurity and a desire to justify one’s salary and position…”
The insecurity aspect is, I think, pertinent and people who are pretending something are more inclined to be insecure. There’s a fear of being rumbled, hence the gratuitous mannerisms. I tend to picture some small squishy creature inflating its gas bladder and hissing in the hope of intimidating passers-by. Tim Burke referred to it as the porcupine strategy.
I tend to picture some small squishy creature inflating its gas bladder and hissing in the hope of intimidating passers-by.
I am stealing that one.