When Althusser (or
>Freud) grabbed "overdetermined" they should have tried hard to make
sure
>that their use of it would have the same or a similar meaning as
previous
>uses of the word.
In my previous post I cited the following, regarding metaphors that are, as I take your argument to suggest, obfuscatingly appropriated:
Species--genus and species--species relations are part of common knowledge; to cross from genus to genus, we need four terms that create what might be called a hypothetical likeness, *one not given by logic or nature* [my stress]
When Althusser or Freud "grabbed" "overdetermined" were they not crossing from genus to genus? Are you not making a categorical mistake, looking for a purity of species relations?
>
>If you don't work hard to use established meanings for words--if you
make
>your own meanings, either because you are too sloppy or careless to
figure
>out what prior users meant,
What about giving a name to what had been "nameless"? The history of language is not a fixed lexicon, meaning is always in flux. The relevance of the word "Psychoanalysis" emerged in a definite historical context. We should not be sloppy or careless (or ignoring of) what Freud or Althusser *meant* by, say, "overdetermination" (i.e. were they in any way seeking to maintain the math-species integrity of the word?).
or because you have a different end in view
>than communication--your writings become hard to read.
>
>Incompetence at the use of language borrowed from other fields does not
>"invalidate the whole effort", but it is a sign that you haven't worked
>very hard at trying to communicate--and thus a clue to readers that
perhaps
>they might find something else more interesting and fruitful than
trying to
>read your works.
Or they might think about a self-critique of their reading habits.
>
>There is a awful lot of good stuff to be read out there, written by
people
>who have sweated blood to try to make it as easy as possible for
readers to
>learn what they know. Why should anyone waste their time reading your
works
>if you haven't sweated blood
I'm appaled at this violent metaphorical appropriation of what would be in actuality quite a nasty phenomenon. :-)
to make your stuff as easy as possible to
>read? To not make the attempt at clarity is to show disrespect to your
>readers.
>
>Now maybe you want to show disrespect to your readers. Maybe you are in
the
>business of, say, trying to raise intellectual barriers to entry so
that
>your particular in-group can monopolize a particular set of academic
>positions.
Like in mathematics departments, with their language police gaurding "overdetermination"?
>
>But suppose that communicating your ideas isn't important enough for
you to
>try to make your readers' task as easy as possible:
suppose that you make
>your readers' life difficult either by using old words in new and
peculiar
>ways, by mangling concepts
So concept and word are one? Did the farmers rise up in contempt when "the ship *plowed* the sea"?
imported from other disciplines that you are too
>sloppy to get right, or simply by using ten four-syllable words where
three
>one-syllable words would do. Isn't that a pretty good clue to a reader
that
>they should go do something else?
If they lack imagination (in the broadest sense), maybe so.
For if communicating your ideas isn't
>that important to you,
Althusser, for instance, didn't consider communicating his ideas all that important? How do we make the distinction between "communicating" and "ideas". Voloshinov comes to mind again, with _Marxism and the Philosophy of Language_. The case of the inner sign: the production of ideas, even before communication with others, is bound up in the material of communication, signs, within the thinker's consciousness.
how could it possibly be important to them?
One would hope they'd suspend disbelief and be open-minded.
-Alec
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