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Theoretical Language

  
  

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grant
18:50 / 06.08.08
most bad writing in theory is found in people poorly imitating (or regurgitating) the writings of either the post-1968 French schools of thought or the Frankfurt School.

I've become more or less convinced over the last couple of years that this is broadly the case: the dominant prose style in critical theory in English is based on works translated from European intellectuals.

Derrida, especially, relies on lots of wordplay and puns that become painfully opaque when one isn't reading with the translator's efforts in mind. He only really started making sense to me in a theory class that started with Lyotard talking about language-as-translation.

At the same time, theorists follow Derrida's lead of having certain words or passages playfully embody the ideas they're discussing, which adds a layer of confusion.
 
 
clever sobriquet
19:38 / 06.08.08
Dusto: I'm not offended, but I'm slightly amused that this would come up in a thread about the clarity and function of language. For the record, I do prefer the gender inclusivity of zie/hir.
 
 
clever sobriquet
20:11 / 06.08.08
As to your other point, you're absolutely correct, but I couldn't really resist paraphrasing Haus paraphrasing me. It seemed clever at the (slightly inebriated) time.
 
 
Dusto
22:02 / 06.08.08
It was worth it just so I could say "said" so many times in a single sentence.
 
 
grant
02:14 / 07.08.08
You've been infected by the theoretical language virus!
 
 
Dusto
15:42 / 07.08.08
HCE: Gramsci actually is an interesting case with regard to the present discussion, since he's a case where obscure language was absolutely necessary, though it causes problems for those who followed him. That is, he used terms like "hegemony" and "subaltern" to stand in for mainstream Marxist terms like "ideology" and "proletariat" so that he could get his writing past the censors, but then other people pick those terms up as new things that get differentiated from what they were originally supposed to mean.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
15:58 / 07.08.08
Really? I think that the suspicions of the Italian Fascists about his sympathies might have been agitated to such an extent by his leadership of the Italian Communist Party that he could have published his subsequent work as crossword puzzles and it would have availed him relatively little. In particular since hegemony was a term used, albeit with a different emphasis, by Lenin, I'm not sure the intent was steganographic.
 
 
Dusto
22:32 / 07.08.08
Well, I can't find the specific reference for the hegemony/ideology connection, but wikipedia gives this as a source for the subaltern/proletariat connection and the idea that he was using coded language to get stuff past his prison censors:

Morton, Stephen. "The subaltern: Genealogy of a concept," in Gayatri Spivak: Ethics, Subalternity and the Critique of Postcolonial Reason. Malden, MA: Polity, 2007: pp. 96-97 and Hoare, Quintin, and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith. “Terminology”, in Selections from the Prison Notebooks. New York: International Publishers, pp. xiii-xiv

My understanding of this subject was from a class I took, and I think I probably recycled all of the readings, but I'll see if I can track down the above article if you want the exact info.
 
  

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