>The problem with general denunciations of "abstractions" and "big words"
>is that
Anyone read Chomsky's linguistics? I haven't gazed at so much as a page, but I'll bet it's not comprehensible to the proverbial carpenter next door (though I doubt that Noam's neighbor in Lexington, Mass., is a pounder of nails). Foucault wasn't writing agitprop for a large audience - he was writing philosophy and history for a scholarly audience.
And we're getting close to the territory that Zizek talked about in my interviews with him - facts are not enough, as much as Chomsky would like to believe so. People often don't want to hear, don't want to know, and to understand the reasons behind that (and get around the defenses) you need the much-maligned theory.
Doug