What an obcure turn this dispute about obscurity has taken.
Surely, any specialized knowledge, like in a trade or jobs or hobby or the hard sciences, will involve complex language the layperson does not understand. But with much of social sciences and art and philosophy and ideology, clearly there is also a lot of useless nonsense gobbledygook being worried over by academics who get to parse nonsense for a living.
Seems to me that the mixture of jibberjabber and substantive intellectual exploration is hard to discern in those areas, maybe because unlike similalrly complex language on welding procedure or physics, philosphes' stuff doesn't get tested in the real everyday world as much (if you were to write a bunch of obscure-sounding nonsense in drafting engineering plans, the bridge that gets built falls down). This operating at a remove from the real world is a weakness but also a strength--- certainly many usefull and real concepts and ideologies have come out the philosophical ivory tower. I find Butler and Zizek challenging and wierd almost beyond worth (and chomsky clear but boring!--- the man is a human quallude, I now buy his audiobooks instead of chamomille tea), but can recognize the way their ideas have shifted the discourse in feminism or the broader left, in ways that eventually ripple out to the real world, or at least mirror that real world in a deeper or more sophisticated way.
As a hobby or interest, academic philosophical jibber jabber is as valid as anything else. As a way of crafting ideology or strategy that will advance the cause of human freedom, its at times useful, but we would do well to be more dubious, and I think there's probably way too much of it on the left. As a specialized skill, I dont think its as skilled or potentially socially usefull as being a plumber or EMT or biologist, but is a lot more so than a whole whole lot of jobs out there--- our present system produces less socially useful work every year. I know academia is a cushy enjoyable job for a lefto to wind up in (and our bivouac in the universities nothing to laugh at in this age of an almost dead left--- teaching much of the next generation is a good thing for us to be doing), but certainly we'd be better off if our politics were more oriented to and concerned with and comprised of plumbers and EMTs etc than partisans of the various pomo strands of gobbledygook thought going around in the ivory tower.
When I was a younger lad I was really into all that gobbledygook. Queer readings of Finnegans Wake and Zizek on Lacan and Derrida on.... well I never really made heads or tails of derrida at all honestly. I decided it wasn't for me, and retreated into the lowbrow, where I'm happier and feel more productive. So its probably unfair for me to snicker at academic nonsense like I do. But I do. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <../attachments/20061211/69da23f2/attachment.htm>