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(Note: I've highlighted questions I consider important in bold)
AARis the language used (in Theory) often detrimental to our understanding - is it justified?
I can answer the first question pretty easily, with a big yes (if by 'our' you are referring to the majority of the world population, and many of the students and faculty of English Lit departments). Shrug, Astrojax, Haus and myself all found it near impossible to decypher Yingling's prose. Haus's interpretation may have come close, but without Yingling to hand we don't know whether it is any better an interpretation than seeing a butterfly, sunset or castrating father figure in a Rorschach test (Death of the Author aside). So, we can say that Yingling has failed us as readers- he obviously had something he wished to communicate, but a random sampling of fairly intelligent people, presumably his target audience, was unable to receive this message. We could even go further, and say that if there was indeed something important that Yingling wished to say and the style he chose prevented it from being said then he is guilty of the intellectual equivalent of a doctor withholding medicine.
Or, we can say (as Haus suggests in the thread in question) that we have failed Yingling- he doesn't invent words or employ grammar, syntax and punctuation in anything but the prescribed manner. Yet we still don't understand. Let's, very scientifically, call these two positions Author Failure (AF) and Reader Failure (RF)
The question of justification is an interesting one. Somebody writing about Particle physics can hardly be accused of obscurantism if Shrug, Astrojax, Haus and myself can't understand his or her paper on electron topography in Umbongo's interpretation of N-space field theory. Some concepts require specialist vocabulary to discuss. But is it necessary to say
'"As soon as a fact is narrated no longer with a view to acting directly on reality but intransitively, that is to say, finally outside of any function other than that of the very practice of the symbol itself, this disconnection occurs, the voice loses its origin, the author enters into his own death, writing begins. The sense of this phenomenon, however, is varied; in ethnographic societies the responsibility for a narrative is never assumed by a person but by a mediator, shaman, or relator whose "performance" - the mastery of the narrative code - may possibly be admired but never his "genius."'
--Roland Barthes, "The Death of the Author" (1977)
... when 'make up your own mind about a text instead of wondering what the author might have meant' would suffice? Okay, my example is slightly snarky, and the selected text hardly the worst offender when it comes to PoMo gobbledygook, but when the 'message' is as simple as that of Barthes's essay, doesn't the language used seem excessive?
In Lacan to the Letter Bruce Fink accuses Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, co-authors of Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science, a book critical of Lacan's misuse of scientific language in his work (amongst many, many other things), of demanding that "serious writing" do nothing other than "convey clear meanings". Fink says Reader Failure, Sokal and Bricmont say Author Failure. (As a side-question to the question of whether hard science terms can be used in Theory- does it matter if they are used correctly or can a philosopher '(equate) the erectile organ to the square root of minus one', to quote from Richard Dawkins' review of Fashionable Nonsense?).
What then can 'serious writing' do other than 'convey clear meanings'? We can enjoy the act of reading it of course, in the way Finnegan's Wake or Naked Lunch or the poetry of John Ashbury can be (mostly) unintelligible but a lot of fun, but the passage quoted above and many like it in the work of Lacan, Deleuze and Guattarri, Derrida and so on never are in my experience. This interpretation turns Theory into a medium of entertainment Then again, the Rorschach-like effect may be the 'point', allowing multiple interpretations to emerge rather than 'privileging' a particular point of view. This succeeds if, like Haus, we are able to put forward an interpretation, and fails if, like Shrug, Astrojax and myself we are not. But, returning to the medicine metaphor, isn't this the intellectual equivalent of Homeopathy- diluting something to the point where it can have no possible effect on the recipient beyond acting as a placebo? Aren't the problems of the world- AIDs for example- important enough for our foremost thinkers to tackle them in such a way that the majority of people affected by these problems can understand what is being said? What are the fields of feminism, race theory, queer theory and postcolonial theory for if not to contribute to the uplift of women, non-white people, homosexuals and former colonial subjects? Aren't we again back to withholding medicine, or are we now performing a kind of reverse triage- doling out medicine to those who need it least (the tiny minority of mostly Western, mostly white, mostly male, mostly straight people who are able to process this 'medicine')? Have we given up on the potential of information and debate to have any positive effect on human life? |
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