I don’t mean to nitpick an otherwise excellent post, but there certainly ARE assistantships available in the humanities; who do you think teaches all those sections of freshman comp? (In fact, the standard advice for prospective grad students in the humanities is that you should never pay your own way; the job prospects are too uncertain, and if you’re a genuinely strong candidate and not a marginal one, they will pay you.)
Does deconstructionism actually challenge any political beliefs? Serious question.
I don’t doubt it. I mean, I was just reacting I guess to what you said about farm workers and soup kitchens. I don’t doubt that the market is tight for post-docs, or that life as an itinerant instructor sucks. It’s one good reason not to do it, I think.
But what do they contribute to human knowledge? That’s sort of the whole issue, isn’t it? That’s the point of the discussion. If what they’re doing is publishing, for the sake of being published, and what they’re saying isn’t affecting the broader community, how much value is there in what they’re doing?
To be clear, I’m not saying academics don’t contribute anything. What I’m saying is that they seem to have invented for themselves a system that actively discourages what they should be trying to achieve.
But is it a tiny percentage? Or is that exactly what characterizes academic writing as academic writing - that it’s stilted, pointlessly complicated, obscure and jargony? In other words, as if it was written by somebody mostly concerned about getting accepted by an academic journal, rather than in communicating an idea.
I’m not going to say, “do you have a cite for that?” because that’s obnoxious. But I will say “that’s not what I’ve heard” because what I’ve heard is that not only do journals publish without remuneration to the authors, they take the copyright for the work as well, so that the original author is actually legally prohibited from publishing it anywhere else, without the journal’s permission.
According to this, academic journals can cost as much as $40k per subscription, per year. I’m sure there are free ones, too. I’m guessing they’re the least prestigious ones - right?
What you have heard is true for some journals, but not all of them.
That’s the price for libraries, and most journals do not cost anywhere near that much even for institutional subscriptions. They’re still very expensive compared to, say, a subscription to Rolling Stone, and frankly I think university libraries are really getting screwed by a lot of journal publishers, but $40,000 a year is not a typical price for a single journal.
Individual journal subscriptions are also much, much cheaper than institutional subscriptions. Journals published by professional organizations are often available at a low cost – or no cost – to members. And as I said, people can read journals for free at a library. That’s why we spend so much money on them, so people can read them.
No. The PLOS (Public Library of Science) journals, for example, are pretty highly regarded, and they’re all open access.
Journals filter submissions, so people can’t publish just any junk they come up with. And in most fields people know the good journals from the bad (in terms of selectivity) so publishing in a journal that accepts 95% of submissions doesn’t do you much good.
Any field uses jargon. I’m involved in engineering stuff, which most people would agree is useful, and papers are full of specialized terms and are quite impenetrable to they layman.
Well, by its very nature it challenges whatever the current dominant paradigm (I have the urge to insert some parenthetical statement disavowing the use of that phrase) is at the time, since that’s the first thing you deconstruct. The current dominant paradigm hates to be questioned, much less analyzed. So, it seems to be inherently against some forms of conservatism,
Sorry, I can’t even begin to resist:
Except maybe Postmodern art.
What characterizes academic research writing is that it is technically specialized, because it’s written for fellow researchers who are also technical specialists. Technically specialized research articles may well look obscure and jargony and complicated to the non-specialist reader, but that’s not necessarily their authors’ fault.
There are plenty of other types of writing produced by academics that are much more broadly accessible to a non-specialist audience, such as textbooks, popular journalism articles, collections of essays for general readers, scripts for documentaries, and so forth.
Complaining that technically specialized research articles in a discipline you’re unfamiliar with are “obscure” and “jargony” is a bit like somebody who doesn’t read Chinese complaining that Chinese writing is just piles of meaningless strokes.
Is there some amount of genuinely bad and incomprehensible academic writing out there in research journals? Sure.
Is the typical vaguely-whiny “academic writing is bullshit” kvetcher capable of telling the difference between genuinely bad and incomprehensible academic writing and academic writing that is merely too technical for the average non-specialist reader to understand? No.
Pointing out that certain negative perceptions are rooted in laziness and ignorance is not the same thing as “hurling insults”.
Don’t take it personally, though: everybody is liable to inadvertently absorb some inaccurate perceptions rooted in laziness and ignorance. That’s why we have these boards, after all.
That is just a very superficial view of what Journals are, specially the science ones.
Of course nothing is perfect, as science writer Peter Hadfield can tell you, but science does not stop with the publication of a bad paper, the process continues with others looking at the work and data and confirming the research or it is dismissed when the errors that do crop later are found. Many times science has to progress around powerful groups that are trying to stop that progress.
qft
+1
There’s still a difference between fields where the jargon is a necessary part of specificity and specialization that still corresponds to some actual meaning, and pomo/criticial theory writing that believes in obscurantism as a virtue in itself and makes up meaningless words to hide the fact that the whole field is a scam.
Thanks for the information! You weren’t nitpicking, you were improving.
Could you provide evidence for this assertion? My experience is that every field has its jargon, that it’s for specificity in communication (as you noted), and that the humanities have their terms as well. What term is commonly used by specialists in “pomo/critical theory” that you are certain is just for the sake of obscurantism?
“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.”
Yes, it is possible to come up with run on sentences, even if they have big words in them.
While this is definitely an obscure and badly written sentence, you can’t really plausibly argue that its author, the Harvard cultural studies theorist Homi K. Bhabha, is just insincerely making shit up to fool people.
Here’s another excerpt from the very same author, in his well-known essay “Culture’s In-Between”:
You may not agree with what Bhabha says or with the importance of his chosen subjects, and you may not like his writing style, but it’s silly to pretend that he never really means anything at all or has any genuine ideas.
As others noted, it’s not that great of a sentence. Which of those terms are regularly used for the sake of obscuratism?
And you know that how?
Reading this would help: Nussbaum, "The Professor of Parody"
The quote I gave is echoed thousands of times over in the works of the Derrida-influenced circle. They have nothing to say and just repeat platitudes run through a thesaurus. “Discourse of splitting” is not a term of art at all. It doesn’t appear anywhere except in the book that quote is from and people quoting it. It doesn’t mean anything at all, it’s just words smashed together. “Enunciatory modality” is a pointless way to say “way of writing.” Jargon used because common English has no word for the concept that “contrapposto” or “deoxyribonucleic” refers to is good, jargon used because an entire academic discipline is full of people who think like precocious 13-year-olds that want to sound smarter by using superfluous big words is bad.
Your link consists of one article primarily about one feminist philosopher (namely Yale professor Judith Butler) whose work the author (philosopher Martha Nussbaum at U Chicago) is criticizing.
I admire Nussbaum’s work and know nothing about Butler, but I think Nussbaum herself would be the first to admit that this article does not count as any kind of quantitative analysis of academic trends overall. (It also has nothing to do with the cite from Bhabha that you flung out as your previous random snippet of ill-informed tsk-tskery.)
Once again, just to broaden the perspective, let’s take a look at a different excerpt from the writings of the same author (in this case, Butler) whom you are deploring on the basis of one or two second-hand sound bites. Here’s a bit from Butler’s essay “Doubting Love” where she discusses Freud’s ideas on the relation between love and self-knowledge:
Again, you’re tossing around unsupported quantitative claims and hyperbolic estimates basically pulled out of your ass. This sort of Chicken Little response to a few cherry-picked examples of pretentious and bad academic writing does not constitute a valid argument about the state of academia in general, or even of “an entire academic discipline”.
Oh, and speaking of opaque-sounding jargon perpetrated by continental philosophers, try this on your pianola: