>Come to think of it, all this means is:
>
>People like to learn stuff. You can tell because they
>like to look at things.
>
>People are social.
>
>Differences between members of a group subume
>differences between different groups.
>
>The word "to be" means different things.
>
>I knew all this when I was 10.
Yeah. One of the things students often say about sociology is that much of it is common sense. Well, that's true. Knowledge that once seemed new and different became part of our common knowledge.
It's not sound argument to claim that something is useless simply because someone else said it first. The claim that its said better by someone else is similarly fallacious. Often, better just means that its something you studied and know, and the stuff you think is hard is stuff you don't know and didn't study.
Sociologists (and I've done this myself) sometimes complain that the poststructuralists are only saying what sociologists have said. So, it's not that they think the poststrucs are wrong, it's that they either don't like how people in _another_ discipline write (they feel excluded by the language) or they are engaging in disciplinary territorialism -- or both.
Of course another disciplinary approach is going to exclude -- that is how disciplines work! The entire structure of academia is all about excluding.
When I was in grad school, feminist theory courses featured Dorothy Smith's work. People would complain she was "difficult." She was writing out of the phenomenological tradition--and, the horror! using male theorists. If you were familiar with philosophy, Smith was a piece of cake. If you weren't, she was hard. (I'm sorry: duh?)
Smith would be denounced because she was a feminist--as if a feminist has an obligation to write so all women can read her. Feminists criticize male discourses in academia, so they're hypocrites for engaging in a similarly exclusive practice. (it's just a fallacious argument, really, and moralizing to boot.)
Yet, as I've said before, my experience is that ordinary people do not understand bell hooks any better than they understand Dorothy Smith. I learned that lesson many times, including when I gave my own work to ordinary people. What I and others thought was clear, journalistic writing free of jargon was _hard_, full of jargon, etc. in the view of our readers. I remember using a piece by Marj Devault on "The Work of Feeding a Family." Seemed pretty clear to us. We used it as part of a reading session we were doing with people in a community where we were trying to figure out ways to revivify institutions that foster public dialogue.
As 'hard' as it was (even though we thought it accessible, initially), people loved being treated as human beings engaged in a collective project--where we learned together. They enjoyed being challenged--in the context of something that mattered. And they enjoyed being given a voice. Because, once we worked through what was hard--together--you watched them get excited because they were seeing the connections--applying what they were reading to their own life experiences and struggles.
So, I don't see that the problem is difficult language and exclusivity. It's the context within which the texts are read. Plop them in a territorial, exclusionary, agonistic forum such as academia and people will feel compelled to stake their disciplinary identity on protecting their turf, dissing what others know and care about, valorizing their own favored intellectual traditions, and turning on its head the supposed mission of a liberal education.
K
"We live under the Confederacy. We're a podunk bunch of swaggering pious hicks."
--Bruce Sterling