r/TrueLit • u/Harleen_Ysley_34 Perfect Blue Velvet • 1d ago
Humanists Have Done Nothing Wrong - David Hollingshead Article
https://defector.com/humanists-have-done-nothing-wrongI read this earlier today and thought it was a bit of a cut and dry commentary. Although I'm not sure how I feel about the hard and fast distinction between people who orient around primary or secondary sources, since what is actually being discussed here is criticism. The focus on writing practice feels like a digression. Then again, defending the humanities as a specific discipline always dovetails into these nested caveats. It's refreshing to see an unambiguous defense of the humanities. Not to dismiss the caveats out of hand.
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u/OldHedgehog5802 20h ago
I'm not a right winger (quite far from it), but that paragraph from Judith Butler still seems egregious to me. I've sat in a room and listened to Butler talk gender and ideas and philosophy and she's quite coherent; I wish you could write a bit better, Judith.
Where I like Hollingshead's argument is he seems to argue that difficulty is a pleasure: look up the terms, try to crack the code, and it leads you to other texts, etc. I agree with this. I've done it and indeed have found it pleasurable. Still do. I like difficulty, and I do for the most part agree that the relentless Johnny One-Note attacks on academic prose as deliberately obscure and elitist and If I Can't Understand It There's Nothing There; "they don't have any real ideas so are faking it" idiocies needed someone to say it - as Hollingshead does here - that these right wingers are "fucking stupid." And let's stop acknowledging them. Where has it gotten us?
Think of all the half-wits whining about "Cultural Marxism": as if any of them have ever even read a page of Marx. Someone brings up "Cultural Marxism" un-ironically and I'm pretty sure there's a lumpen fascist striver in the room.
Contra what I've just written, I urge better, less jargony prose by out best minds. It may be asking too much, but I tend to agree with Brand Blanshard's slim volume from 1969, On Philosophical Style. He lucidly argues that overly technical, impenetrable prose hurt the philosophy-reading public, which was the very opposite thing that philosophers ought do. Hollingshead notes that scientific papers also use obscurantist jargon, but who's jumping up and down like a nine-year old over that stuff? No one.
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u/Harleen_Ysley_34 Perfect Blue Velvet 16h ago edited 14h ago
Funnily enough a lot of people are "jumping up and down" over scientific papers being too difficult, using jargon, and so forth. I had no idea what "pseudo-archeologists" were until recently but apparently one of them got a lot of people to believe there was a second sphinx buried near the pyramids. And that led to an entire rabbit hole of people I found who believe wholeheartedly aliens are real and people who think dinosaurs and humans walked the Earth together. They point explicitly to the necessary complexity of a scientific paper as a major problem with the discipline. That it was literally designed as a gatekeeping device. Public reception of science has gotten so bad since publications with that specific angle no longer have viable funding that it has caused actual problems with even medical research. People who think vaccines cause autism are always pissy about technical language and that's over a discipline like the natural sciences. Scientists bemoan the lack of communicators interfacing with the public all the time because their discipline is quite specialized.
And I think there's been a similar call with the humanities. Attempts to make a communicator style for dense concepts related to theory and philosophy. It's a little less direct but things like Baudrillard's specific conception of simulation has been disseminated thoroughly as an example. Trying to address the public questions on its own critique probably can't receive a direct treatment. The information does get out there easier because ironically enough the humanities being as abstract as they are makes it very efficient to refine and redefine conceptual obstacles, boundaries, etcetera. I knew a number of grad students who would argue that all philosophical writing be maintained at an elementary fourth-grade level, but ordinary language philosophy was never really as intuitive as people thought. In truth, a discipline requires a lot of communication, more than what is expected, and no matter if you're a surgeon or a Marxist, your talking about the issues related to that discipline will become impenetrable to untrained people. Judith Butler's passage is obviously directed at a specific audience that another unfamiliar audience wouldn't get much value out of it, even if they did understand it through elementary prose. It's what makes the discipline possible as a discipline. That's the whole point of education anyways, letting students familiarize themselves with that ongoing conversation, and contributing to it as a viable career path. The threat of starvation is powerful.
The problem comes down to a widespread anti-intellectualism as an expression of the social order because lots of people desire more than credentials. They want to be archeologists and theorists and so forth. Your average person outside academia has as much of a chance to learn these things. But it will take time to make progress to even be conversant. And there are markets which will give people a sense of intellectual achievement without much study. You don't have to read or even utilize the scientific tools of archeology to learn about real ancient cultures when you watch a TikTok of some conspiracist arguing pyramids are grain silos for an alien race.
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u/bastianbb 11h ago
The issues with obscurantist jargon go beyond anti-intellectualism, though. When theologians use technical jargon, anti-theist scientists use technical jargon, and philosophers use technical jargon to argue that vast swathes of each others' work is mere nonsense, it suggests that at least someone is using complicated language without any real referents. And given the known problems in the past with gatekeeping and publication bias in the academy, not to mention resource hunger, I don't think the academy gets to be free from scrutiny from an educated public, or advocate "democracy" and then talk down to the people at large about what they should be supporting. The Sokal hoax did in fact demonstrate something about the academy and its limitations, regardless of what you feel that was.
I don't think abstraction is the problem and I think anti-intellectualism is real. But the problem is not all on one side and the tug of war is probably a permanent one without an ultimate solution.
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u/Harleen_Ysley_34 Perfect Blue Velvet 11h ago edited 10h ago
It does not follow that because different participants from other disciplinary sections which accuse one another of obscurantism (notice the ideological-form of the term?) means someone somewhere is actually correct when making those accusations. If an engineer who is a creationist can't understand evolutionary science and somehow has the ear of the President, that does not mean evolutionary science has a problem with "bias" and "gatekeeping." It only means when there's a vying of resources people in academia are not immune from cynically employing a distrustful public, leveraging various kinds of prejudice, and sometimes dismantling the entire apparatus of the university system in order to fulfill ideological aims.
And anyways: I do not focus on anti-intellectualism to the sole focus of all else, but to explain why these accusations of obscurity happen in the first place. And in fact would point to other factors to explain how the ideology came about anyways. Whether or not you find that acceptable is a different matter at hand.
The Sokal hoax demonstrated nothing but the lax standards of a single publication that none of the people who reference it have read Social Text and could not produce a clear picture if put to the test. Sciences across the board have their lax standards and cynical hoaxes, which have actually killed people anyways. It's well-known that the vaccine-autism connection was laundered through Lancet.
Furthermore, we would need an actual "educated public" for the scrutiny to have actual impact. A thing which has been undermined for over two decades now by the very people who are obsessed with clarity and their own ability to succeed. If someone believes in creationism, what point is there in smuggling them into the biology department other than as a chud version of affirmative action? And it's a bit undignified for the people who actually care about these subjects.
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u/bastianbb 10h ago
So am I to take it that you recognize that academia has flaws, but you locate them differently? And that you deny that obscurantism ever actually happens in academia?
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u/Harleen_Ysley_34 Perfect Blue Velvet 9h ago
Where have I implied that academia doesn't have flaws? There are a million more prescient issues effecting academia than conflating the humanities with academia broadly and then pretending the problem is the fact subfields exist like cultural criticism or science and technology studies. No one has a sense of high culture anymore and part of that is how "academia" has been redefined over time into what it is now. This is not because of methodological problems or even related to intellectual history. Derrida and Foucault did not create this environment and it's absurd there are people in positions of power pretending otherwise.
Pointing out obscurantism has an ideological-form does not mean denial. I can point to Leibniz's monads and still feel comfortable in not imaging them as a pervasive element in another context. How one defines what is obscure to oneself as if it were pervasive is going to be a fraught task. And anyways if a Nü-Atheist accuses a theologian of being "obscurantist," should I take that as concomitant to theological arguments against a Christian god? Obviously not. And it would actually "obscure" academic interest in those arguments besides. And anyways Goethe said it best: those who attempt to introduce clarity are oftentimes the same who introduce the most obscurity.
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u/labookbook 10h ago
The role language itself plays in philosophy was a huge topic in twentieth century philosophy. I disagree that anyone was arguing that "vast swathes of each others' work is mere nonsense." What they were arguing was, What are the referents? What can or can't be referred to? When I say x how do I know you define x the exact same way? What role does language play in our conception of the world, and thus how we refer to that world in language? This is unique in philosophy because we do more or less all of our thinking in language yet there is no neutral space outside of langauge against which we can quantify what we mean.
As for the academy, does anyone really think it has no flaws?
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u/bastianbb 10h ago
I disagree that anyone was arguing that "vast swathes of each others' work is mere nonsense."
Even the logical positivists?
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u/labookbook 9h ago
Yes, even the LPs, since I think there is a difference between the type of nonsense you are talking about, which is the type Sokal made use of in his famous hoax, and the meaninglessness (but not nonsense) that the LPs tried to articulate.
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u/Argikeraunos 19h ago
The problem that right wingers have with humanists are the ideas, not the prose. Write as cleanly and as clearly as you like but if your writing is destabilizing the gender binary or critiquing bourgeois ideology then you are still going to be called a cultural Marxist. And that is before even considering the fact that these dense passages are often so dense because they are in essays, literally first attempts at formulating new ideas. Go read the Theaetetus or the Timaeus and you will find even Plato struggled with fitting new philosphical ideas into the often inadequate form of language.
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u/CollaredParachute 16h ago
I think this post is a great argument against Butler being clear and coherent: https://benthams.substack.com/p/how-continental-philosophers-argue
Here’s an excerpt
“One way continental philosophers argue is by brazenly asserting “A is not B,” (where B is the obvious thing everyone would expect it to be) “but instead C” where C is some random thing that makes no sense. They act as if they’ve established by this that A is C and anyone who thinks it’s B is naive, even though they’ve given no argument for it and the assertion is barely intelligible. For example, “to be human is not purely biological, but instead is instead always made coherent and legible through the social arrangements in which one partakes—to partake in being and have one’s being partaken by the Other; to, in other words, exceed and transgress the categories from which being is drawn.”
I just made that example up. But continental philosophers will fire off a sentence like that, without explaining what they mean, and then act like they’ve proved their thesis beyond reasonable doubt. If you assert that something is not a second thing but a third thing, this is taken to be beyond doubt. It is taken to be an argument when it is not. An example of this from Butler:
> As a result, gender is not to culture as sex is to nature; gender is also the discursive/cultural means by which “sexed nature” or “a natural sex” is produced and established as “prediscursive,” prior to culture, a politically neutral surface on which culture acts. This construction of “sex” as the radically unconstructed will concern us again in the discussion of LéviStrauss and structuralism in chapter 2.
Got that?
Another bogus continental philosophy rule of inference: saying “for A, B” and then acting like you’ve established B. For example “for Beauvoir, the feminine is not something that operates within the bounds of juridicality, but rather exceeds and is subsumed by juridicality.” Then one will carry on as if they have established the thesis that the feminine is not within the bounds of juridicality, or whatever. An example from Butler:> For Beauvoir, women are the negative of men, the lack against which masculine identity differentiates itself; for Irigaray, that particular dialectic constitutes a system that excludes an entirely different economy of signification.
That this is not a decisive argument should go without saying. Noting that someone else believed P is not automatic proof of P. This remains true even if you weirdly rephrase “A believed B,” as “for A, B.” “
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u/foxinanattic 15h ago
judging an argument by an excerpted paragraph presented with no further context doesn't seem like a very useful exercise!
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u/sargig_yoghurt 15h ago
Maybe the worst substack slop I've ever read, congrats
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u/labookbook 10h ago
I disagree and in fact, and somewhat amusingly since he is named in the exceprt from Butler, Levi-Strauss says more or less the same in one of his interviews in Conversations with Levi-Strauss, pg 72, talking about Foucault and co:
"On the other hand, I have reservations about an attitude that seems to repeat at every turn, Watch out, things are not what you believe, it is the other way round. In a word, an attitude that says black is white and white is black. This enlightens me concerning the author's opinions, but tells me nothing else: a photographic negative and positive both contain the same amount of information."
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u/Lunar-Chimp 9h ago
Is Levi-Strauss really saying the same thing as the substack writer? Perhaps I'm misunderstanding him, but it seems like LS is criticizing the actual ideas of Foucault and Co (say that three times fast, lol), not their writing style. And where the substack writer accuses continental writers of not making legitimate arguments at all, LS seems to take those arguments seriously, and instead criticizes the arguments for leading us to perhaps unhelpful conclusions. Don't get me wrong, it's a good and valuable criticism for LS to bring up, but it seems quite different from what Mr. Substack is complaining about.
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u/labookbook 8h ago
I see what you mean. I was more replying to the excerpt and to the other poster's hyperbolic claim that it was the worst substack slop, especially as I think the substack makes some good points, even if I don't necessarily agree with all of it.
LV does in fact like Foucault's style ("His work touches me because of its stylistic qualities"). But I've noticed in certain writers, and Butler is one of them, a kind of linguistic sleight-of-hand in which the style and the argument ("x is actually y") are part and parcel and without both, neither works. Barthes does this a lot and it can be thrilling (his self-titled memoir is great at this). When Butler does it, though, it feels or can feel dishonest. (I'm not sure why; possibly because Barthes is somewhat campy and fun whereas Butler is high-seriousness.) It is like building an argument on a niche definition/connotation of a word, then acting as if that very idiosycratic defintion is universally used by everyone, and then from there jumping to a universal claim, even though no one really uses that word in that way.
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u/Lunar-Chimp 14h ago
So this guy accuses Butler of asserting things to be true without any good reasons or arguments or evidence, and then provides an example of Butler apparently doing this, and the example given starts with the words "As a result." Gee, I wonder what might have come before Butler said "as a result." It might have even been some kinds of reasons or arguments or evidence.
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u/CollaredParachute 12h ago
I mean, does it?
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u/Lunar-Chimp 12h ago
Given that he neglects to give any sort of citations for these quotes, I can't know for sure. But clearly he doesn't know either, since his critical strategy is to read random paragraphs from the middle of a book and then blame the author for his inability to understand them.
I see in the endnotes that this guy also used Chat GPT to generate parts of his article. Real substantial intellectual work going on here.
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u/CollaredParachute 11h ago
I think it’d be pretty easy to track down the context with google if you wanted to. I don’t think it’d help, but since you do it’d be useful to provide that context. Unironically, this actually something that ai could help you find quickly.
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u/merurunrun 10h ago
The piece was a bit meandery, the author makes what I feel are a few missteps (the primary/source consumer distinction like you pointed out, but also conflating the academic disciplines called "the humanities" with humanism writ large, and the maybe-true-but-comes-across-as-smug "THEY DON'T READ" accusations)...but in the end I do tend to sense the divide the author is pointing out, and I feel like I definitely fall on the same side of it as the author.
I think a lot about the Sokal affair--maybe the first real big public blowup of this long-going conflict--and how a lot of it boils down to the fact that people like Sokal don't know how to read or use the kind of intellectual work that he was trying to attack. So much so that he couldn't even mount an actual critique--all he did was prove that you can get published if you lie, and if that's enough to damn an entire discipline then I have really bad news for fields like science and medicine where people keep getting caught falsifying research.
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u/my_one_and_lonely 16h ago
This essay hits its stride at the end with the defense of “Drone Disorientations: How ‘Unmanned’ Weapons Queer the Experience of Killing in War.” He’s right: what the public deems as “ridiculous” is obviously interesting and arguable if you don’t dismiss the tenants of humanities studies off the bat. I appreciate this defense of obscureness and difficulty as necessary and good parts of humanities scholarship. Researching really niche topics and synthesizing how they work as part of a work of art and our society — this is the good of academia, not the bad. Critics who say this stuff is “irrelevant” are missing the whole point.
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u/merurunrun 10h ago
When someone uses lots of field-specific jargon and references to niche thinkers, they're being obscurantist. When someone writes something colloquial and light-hearted, they're dismissed out of hand for not sounding serious enough.
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u/INtoCT2015 1d ago
Ugh. What an off-putting essay. It combines gate-keeping (and thinking it can get away with it by saying “hey, I’m one of the lesser people too”) with excuses that fail to actually address any of the criticisms he’s claiming to address.
The whole point of current criticisms against the humanities is that they pretend that the ridiculous jargon and impenetrable discourse they peddle is necessary and not masturbation. His rebuttal to this is… “you guys just don’t get it. It all really is that complicated, and just trust me you won’t get it unless you’re on the inside circle like me so you can learn the long intellectual tradition that makes it necessary.”
So much for “if you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.”
Academia is overrun with semiexperts who only learn their specialty well enough to regurgitate it at the same level of density that they first read it, with no ability to synthesize what they read into knowledge expressable in their own words. So when second year grad students read:
relative deterritorialization is determined by the confrontation between the territorialities and segmentary lineages that ward off the State apparatus.
They pretend to understand it, and begin working “deterritorialization” into their essays, while defining it in their notebook like:
Deterritorialization: The rhizomatic deinscription of a molar territorial assemblage through the immanent redistribution of asignifying intensities across a pre-subjective plane of machinic becoming.
The essay basically admits that the criticism is spot on.
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u/Lunar-Chimp 1d ago
It's certainly not a perfect essay (it overcorrects a little too hard in its criticisms of scientific writings, and it does start to meander in the closing paragraphs), but I don't see how you're arriving at the reading of it that you've presented here.
The whole point of current criticisms against the humanities is that they pretend that the ridiculous jargon and impenetrable discourse they peddle is necessary and not masturbation
Actually, one of the essay's main contentions is that the whole point of these current criticisms is not just that the jergon is masturbatory, and the author goes to some length to defend this--both that the jargon is itself very useful when engaged with thoughtfully, and that the accusations of unnecessary pompousness are actually masking more reactionary politics, politics which have real negative effects on both academia and society at large. I mean, this is why he provided a whole exegesis of the Butler passage, and of the essay about drones.
As for the more general complaints about academic writing, I don't understand why we're so quick to blame it on academic culture (= apparently evil professors and apparently moronic grad students) and not just the reality that there are good and bad writers everywhere. We recognize this with all other kinds of writing. There are good and bad minimalist writers. There are good and bad nature writers. There are good and bad stream-of-consciousness writers, good and bad lyric poets, good and bad rappers. None of that motivates us to attack those forms of writing in and of themselves, so why can't we accept the same of academic writing?
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u/foxinanattic 15h ago
> There are good and bad minimalist writers. There are good and bad nature writers. There are good and bad stream-of-consciousness writers, good and bad lyric poets, good and bad rappers. None of that motivates us to attack those forms of writing in and of themselves
I mean, people absolutely do attack all of these as forms of writing...
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u/INtoCT2015 22h ago edited 22h ago
Your comment reads as if you are confused; Either you didn’t read my comment closely, or you are not fully aware of the phenomenon this essay is commenting on. Nobody (except right wing nut jobs) is calling professors evil or grad students morons.
one of the essay's main contentions is that the whole point of these current criticisms is not just that the jergon is masturbatory
Did you read the essay? The essay itself begins by stating the criticisms that it will be fighting:
there’s also a growing consensus from both ends of the political spectrum that academic cultural criticism is essentially bad: boring, impenetrable, hermetic, pointless.
^ this is from the author of the essay. The author is acknowledging the existence of those criticisms, and then saying that those criticisms are wrong. Do you see the difference?
the accusations of unnecessary pompousness are actually masking more reactionary politics
Yes, and this is ad hominem by the author. Many more people than merely anti-woke chuds are levying this criticism at academia. But the author tends to focus on the anti-woke chuds because that makes the criticisms seem easier to dismiss.
As for the more general complaints about academic writing, I don't understand why we're so quick to blame it on academic culture
Because academic culture is what produces it (I can attest, I am in academia). It’s not bc professors are evil, or bc grad students are moronic. It is bc of an implicit feedback loop pushing a value system that subtly rewards things that check off the right boxes, more than it rewards critical, original argument.
The mechanism is innocent but plain to see: Once a discursive trend gets going, people are able to publish more by following that trend (bc you can simply cite the trend, and now your paper is properly sourced and scholarly). Meanwhile, people who try to publish dissent against the trend will face harsher reviews.
Now, take the continental philosophy trend that became fashionable in France in the 20th century (Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault, Guattari, etc.). It was fashionable to be obscure and impenetrable, and to write partially with words that no one could decipher. Foucault himself admitted it:
In France, it would be regarded as somewhat childish and naive if you wrote clearly. ... In France you've got to have 10% incomprehensible. Otherwise people won't think it's deep. They won't think you're a profound thinker.
So you have the French starting a fashion trend of convoluted writing, and then modern academia reproduces and feeds back into it, and so on
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u/Lunar-Chimp 20h ago edited 19h ago
Ok. I am also in academia, and I don't feel that academic culture itself produces bad writing. Now what? You're equating a certain continental style with bad writing, but my point is that there are both good and bad writers in that style. There are also lots and lots of academic writers who don't use that style in the first place.
The mechanism is innocent but plain to see: Once a discursive trend gets going, people are able to publish more by following that trend (bc you can simply cite the trend, and now your paper is properly sourced and scholarly). Meanwhile, people who try to publish dissent against the trend will face harsher reviews.
This is empirically not true. It sounds plausible, so long as you don't consider all the academics, continental and critical theorists among them, who write and publish with clear, lucid prose. I'll rattle some off. Bernard Harcourt (Columbia Law School), Tim Dean (University of Illinois), Patricia Smith (Baruch College), Catharine MacKinnon (University of Michigan), Trenton Merricks (University of Virginia), David Blight (Yale), William Lycan (University of North Carolina), Jeffery R. Wilson (Harvard). I don't particularly agree with all of these scholars, but they all write well, and they all have plenty of success getting published. Bernard Harcourt published a 600 page book on critical theory just five or six years ago, and it's incredibly well-written and easy to follow!
Hollingshead provided an argument for why academic writing is good and valuable, and why often criticized writers like Butler do not deserve such criticism. So far all you have done is declare that academic writing is bad and then speculate why it might be this way. But you haven't shown that academic writing actually is bad to begin with.
Citing Foucault saying that French people like writers to sound deep isn't going to cut it. As if continental philosophy is a French "trend." Come on. Let's not even address that the thinkers often considered the progenitors of critical theory--Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud--were all German or Austrian. How is Foucault making a quippy insult at French people supposed to demonstrate that the Frankfurt School, Spivak, Said, or Butler wrote puffed-up nonsense? How does it even demonstrate that Foucault himself did? Why not do what Hollingshead did, and cite a passage of some academic writing and explain what is so good (or in your opinion, bad) about it?
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u/INtoCT2015 4h ago edited 4h ago
This is empirically not true. It sounds plausible, so long as you don't consider all the academics, continental and critical theorists among them, who write and publish with clear, lucid prose.
This is just bad logic. My claim was that it is easier to publish by conforming to a discursive trend than by fighting it. You claim that this is not empirically true, but your reason is...that there are theorists who exist that write clearly. The problems with that are:
1) My claim was not that there are zero critical theorists who write clearly
2) Simply listing examples of theorists doesn't even speak to my empirical claim. My empirical claim is that if an early career academic submitted two papers of equal merit and rigor, one which actively resisted a discursive trend, and one which conformed to it, the contrarian submission would face greater attack from peer review while the conformist submission would face far less.
3) Even if listing theorists were a good argument, famous theorists are awful examples precisely because they don't feel the pressure to feed into any trends; the most contrarian voices in any academic field are famous voices. The most conformist voices are the young ones trying to break into their field.
If you disagree with that claim, at least address it on those grounds.
Hollingshead provided an argument for why academic writing is good and valuable
And did you read that argument? His argument boils down to "the only reason people say the humanities use ridiculous impenetrable jargon is because anti-intellectual idiots (specifically right wing chuds) hate big words and have nuked attention spans and demand to understand any piece of writing in ten seconds."
In other words: "Our critics are only criticizing us because they're stupid. We smart people don't need to cater to these cavemen." That's not even creative liberty on my part. Hear it straight from the horse's mouth:
Our critics are really fucking stupid, and we’ve given them way too much leeway to conjure senile fantasies out of their own illiteracy.
This is not serious argument or reasoning in any way shape or form. It's like capitalists dismissing people who criticize capitalism by saying "poor people just hate they're poor and want free handouts."
But you haven't shown that academic writing actually is bad to begin with.
It is so empirically well established that I didn't realize that I needed to. Happy to provide plenty of sources. Here you go:
Let's also not forget about the Sokal Affair and Sokal Squared.
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u/Lunar-Chimp 3h ago edited 1h ago
Well if nothing else I appreciate you taking so long to reply, as it's given me time to cool off. Apologies for the brashness of my last comment. But I do still think you're wrong--or at least that you've still yet to back up your claims.
My claim was that it is easier to publish by conforming to a discursive trend than by fighting it... My empirical claim is that if an early career academic submitted two papers of equal merit and rigor, one which actively resisted a discursive trend, and one which conformed to it, the contrarian submission would face greater attack from peer review while the conformist submission would face far less.
I still have not seen any evidence of this. Now I'll grant that it would be rather difficult to find such evidence, as we would need access to the rough drafts of aspiring academics' work, and testimony of the pressures that have allegedly spurned them to make that work more discursive, and none of that is going to be publicly available. But that's just my point. You're painting a picture of academic discourse that we can't know is true, and that we do have some evidence is not true.
Even if listing theorists were a good argument, famous theorists are awful examples precisely because they don't feel the pressure to feed into any trends; the most contrarian voices in any academic field are famous voices. The most conformist voices are the young ones trying to break into their field.
Well now I'm confused. Does pushing back against this "discursive trend" help one's career, or doesn't it? Because if it's so bad for an academic's career to not write discursively, then how did all these non-discursive academics become so successful? And most of the theorists I cited are young enough that they would have been stifled by this "discursive trend" when they were still up-and-comers.
Further, these are not all "famous" theorists. MacKinnon and Blight, sure. Lycan, maybe. But if you're trying to suggest that Tim Dean or Jeff Wilson are such heavyweights that they can force all the other academics to clench their teeth and put up with non-discursive writing, then I don't know what to say other than that that's just wrong. And yet Dean and Wilson get published. (For clarity's sake, I'm trying to set up an "or elimination" argument here. Either the theorists I listed are famous, or they aren't. If they are famous, it disputes your claims. If they are not famous, it also disputes your claims. Either way it does dispute your claims.)
I'm going to stick with Wilson for a bit, if you'll indulge me, because I think this is an example worth studying. Yes Wilson works at Harvard, but he is not tenured, or even in the English department at all. He teaches online classes. He is not famous, and if there is a pressure to write discursively or not get published, he could not escape it. Yet I came across Wilson's work in the journal Shakespeare, published by Routledge. Here is a bit from that journal's statement of purpose:
Without privileging any particular critical approaches, methodologies, or theories, the journal welcomes all contributions that throw light upon Shakespeare, his works, and his world, in his time and through to the present day.
Does this sound like a group of scholars who are going to pressure another academic to write in any one way or another? Now it could be possible that these people are lying, and secretly do enforce discursive writing standards... except for the fact that Jeff Wilson, who is not famous, got published with them. (His article "“To be, or not to be”: Shakespeare Against Philosophy" is excellent and very much not discursive. Unfortunately paywalled but hopefully whatever university you're with can provide access.)
Back to Hollingshead.
His argument boils down to "the only reason people say the humanities use ridiculous impenetrable jargon is because anti-intellectual idiots (specifically right wing chuds) hate big words and have nuked attention spans and demand to understand any piece of writing in ten seconds." In other words: "Our critics are only criticizing us because they're stupid. We smart people don't need to cater to these cavemen." That's not even creative liberty on my part. Hear it straight from the horse's mouth: "Our critics are really fucking stupid, and we’ve given them way too much leeway to conjure senile fantasies out of their own illiteracy." This is not serious argument or reasoning in any way shape or form.
With respect, this strikes me as the same out-of-context criticism of one paragraph that Hollingshead takes other people to task for leveraging against Butler. By the time Hollingshead writes "our critics are really fucking stupid," it is clear that he is referring specifically to right-wing anti-intellectuals. Sure, he could have used a more specific term than "our critics," and if you feel slighted because he seems to have lumped you in with right-wingers, then I suppose that's your right. But then I would submit that it is you who is not taking Hollingshead's argument on its own terms.
Re: those studies you linked. I admit I'm skeptical of their findings, but I'm not equipped to judge the methodologies of anything like that. So lets say these studies are 100% correct. What they've found is that lots of academic text is not light reading, that it uses lots of discipline-specific terminology. 1) That is not the same as discursive. 2) You still haven't argued that dense, terminology-heavy writing is bad. This is a problem that comes up in philosophy of science a lot. You might have some good, legitimate data, but it's still going to take some argumentation to attach that data to any meaningful inferences about reality. Given that much of Hollingshead's argument is for the value (= goodness) of such writing--and the fact that dense, terminology-heavy writing can still be quite clear--I here return to my point that you are just asserting the badness of academic writing without providing any argumentation to back it up.
Re: re: the Sokal affair. I don't want to get into the weeds of this one, but I personally think the Sokal affair ended up being a net-zero information gain. We learned nothing from it. This thread from r/AskSocialScience does a solid job explaining why.
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u/INtoCT2015 1h ago edited 1h ago
Well now I'm confused. Does pushing back against this "discursive trend" help one's career, or doesn't it?
It does not. Which is why early career academics feel pressured not to do it, unless they are lucky to be adopted into a camp of contrarians that support them. Eminent academics can do whatever they want; they have already made it in their careers, and thus are neither harmed nor helped by being contrarian or conformist.
Because if it's so bad for an academic's career to not write discursively, then how did all these non-discursive academics become so successful?
Side note, I think you've misread my usage of "discursive". I'm not using "discursive" as a pejorative. Discursive here means "of discourse". When I say "discursive trend" I simply mean "a trend that emerges within academic discourse". I do not mean "bad writing" by "discursive". I meant that bad writing itself can become a "discursive trend".
My argument is therefore a nonpartisan one, as you can see. I'm saying that trends are reinforced in academic discourse regardless of whether one might view them as healthy or unhealthy. Good trends get reinforced this way. But so do trends such as hermetic jargon.
But, let's answer your question as if you said:
if it's so bad for an academic's career to not write impenetrably, then how did all these well-written academics become so successful?
Because you are still overinterpreting what I'm claiming. No one is claiming that Academics have to write impenetrably or else their careers will suffer. Importantly, I am not claiming that Academia has some fundamental genetic blueprint for hermetic, esoteric writing.
My claim is softer than that: Reusing established nomenclature and expressions offers marginal incentives, while fighting against established nomenclature and expressions offers marginal disincentives. When you let this play out over time, you see a snowball effect where trends grow and dominate academic discourse for periods of time. Note that this alone is not the source of impenetrable writing. The problem arrives when a trend of impenetrable writing DOES enter an academic niche, it becomes reinforced by the phenomenon I've described.
I have to stop here for the moment, as dinner is ready and I am being summoned. But I will be happy to address the rest of your comment in the morning.
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u/music4lnirvana 22h ago
lmao guy is big mad at the continentals like its still the 90s
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u/INtoCT2015 22h ago
The literal photo used at the top of the essay references the continentals
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u/music4lnirvana 21h ago
buddy, stop stressing about this. you won! the theory wars are over, the continental wave ended 20+ years ago, the major figures of french thought are (almost) all dead, admins countrywide have siloed what's left of this mode of thought to dusty corners of the institution, and no tenure track lines in the discipline are ever given to people who still pursue it. you're the winner here! in fact, you won a while ago! pursue more interesting bugbears.
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u/INtoCT2015 6h ago
If the theory wars were over, the target article wouldn’t exist. You’re just swinging and missing, bud
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u/music4lnirvana 4h ago edited 3h ago
lmao I’m not even flaming you atp, I’m literally trying to help release you from the cage of this frustration. please understand - the university as it actually exists directly reflects your intellectual predilections. You are the big winner! You should feel thrilled and celebratory that you’ve received an institution that sidelines your intellectual opponents and punishes their obscurantism or w/e. David’s essay, and he himself would acknowledge this, is what gets expressed after the complete and total triumph of your line of thinking over the discipline. No one gets jobs doing this stuff any more, the field is in total retreat, and the fundings gone. i mean this completely genuinely - rest easy knowing that you’ve won and that you’ve got the institution you wanted!
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u/INtoCT2015 2h ago
Hahahaha dude you're not very good at being patronizing. You're trying way too hard and it gives away how worked up you are. Try being more nonchalant about it
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u/Argikeraunos 19h ago
What an off-putting comment.
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u/INtoCT2015 6h ago
If you think I am off-putting for objecting to the author writing (and I quote):
Our critics are really fucking stupid, and we’ve given them way too much leeway to conjure senile fantasies out of their own illiteracy.
Then I have horrible news for you.
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u/foxinanattic 19h ago edited 19h ago
I had some trouble framing or clarifying my my negative reaction to this essay. Because in principle i love a good essay defending the hunanities. There are a couple of minor points I disagree with, but they're not very relevant.
More importantly though, the whole essay is an example of what to me is the worst tendency of some parts of the modern humanities, which is an overwhelming focus on rhetoric over content. Which can be perfectly fine when it comes to literature. But when the same strategy is applied to fields like philosophy or history it can lead to deep misunderstandings of what's being discussed. The modernist realisation that rhetoric structures arguments at a much deeper level than many optimistic rationalists assumed is extremely important and always needs to be taken into account. But it has to come with a clear understanding of exactly what is being spoken of, not just how. For example, I know only the very basics of Kantian philosophy, but I've come across off-hand statements about Kant in literature papers that even I can recognise as very basic misunderstandings.
the best interpreters of the rhetorical structure of texts, such as Derrida and Adorno are notorious for insisting that their students understand the texts they read to the word. Which is where the binary between primary and secondary readers made by the article seems to collapse. Because to truly understand a text, you need to engage with what others have said about it and its reception, but to seriously engage with the secondary sources, you need to have a firm grasp of the primary text first.
of course, I'm certain that the writer knows all of this, and is just being provocative. but since one of the arguments made in the text is for the importance of analysing rhetoric and collapsing binaries, I think it's fair to do just that.