Thanks for reading. I hope it was clear and passed Orwell's own test (for the most part). If this is your first time here and you found this piece interesting or useful, do subscribe and click the article 'like' button – it helps others see it.
I think your subliminal meta-narrative juxtaposes the semiotic contextualization underpinning the autonomous and hierarchical frameworks of temporally-based sub-linear structures of modality with the dominant sub-schema of contingent re-actualizations of homological meaning in a problematically consanguineous fashion.
I think I've just broken my head. Need to lie down.
Language in general has been captured by aliens. You can read most corporate websites and afterwords ask yourself,” What exactly does this company actually do?”
Thanks for pointing to Orwell's essay, which was humbling to read and is a wonderful guide to clearer prose. It is astonishing that 80 years ago he observed: The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’.
I also re-read Tom Wolfe's "Radical Chic" about once a year, reporting at Leonard Bernstein's upper class fundraiser for the Black Panthers. Not just for moral clarity but also to laugh out loud.
Perhaps the language is often so complex because it tries to hide the truth instead of unraveling it (although there is no such thing as 'the truth' according to postmodernists)
I agree. Many if not most cults create jargon and private languages that only the members are privy to.
That being said, I also attribute obscure writing to the author's refusal to perform the communication project she has assigned to herself. She does not want her readers to understand what she is saying, which is the entire purpose of writing. In the case of philosophers, I wonder if such a tendency reflects some personal oddity that is endemic to university philosophy departments.
I found essays on anthropology hard. The sentences were so long that by the time you reached the verb, you had forgotten the subject. I am old now, but I love to read anything other than the output of people infected by critical theory. The next time I read such an obfuscated essay, I will take your lead and simplify it. If any meaning remains, I'll send it to the author. Reading you, Frederick, is like drinking from a clear spring. I feel so much brighter afterwards. Thank you!
You'll have this same experience with Marcel Proust and Henry James.
But once you learn to chop those long sentences up into short declarative statements, you'll discover whether the author actually had anything to say or not.
Ah, the good old weaponization of language: confusing you with verbiage so you think you're not clever enough to understand, in the hope you don't discern the holes in the argument.
It is my experience that when a theory or an idea are really, truly robust, they can usually be boiled down - even if this errs on the side of oversimplification - to a paragraph, or even a single sentence.
When the idea is sound (it does not even have to be morally correct, just a sound argument) it can be distilled to very few words. Thus Schopenauer: It's all about the will for power. Marx: It's all about capital. Libertarianism: As long as nobody gets hurt, do what thy will. etc. etc.
When you scrape away the stucco, even the most ornamental baroque structures should be based on straight lines
I appreciate your distinction between difficult writing that says something abstract but meaningful, e.g. Kant and Heidegger, and difficult, obscure writing that says nothing most or all of the time. The one that comes to mind is Judith Butler, whom I was forced to read in grad school. Interestingly, she is the intellectual ancestor of modern trans ideology and also happened to be an anti-Israel Jew -- both terrible forms of Leftism. I also studied Kant and Heidegger, and it took me about three months of daily reading with each to really understand them, but once I did, it was rewarding because they pointed to something important and real. What they said was worth the effort. Not so with those who used neo-Marxist sociological jargon (as distinct from legit sociologists like Peter Berger). Nothing lies beneath it.
But it's actually worse than saying nothing. The problem with this sort of writing is not just that it wastes your time but that it's been used to undermine the older and more noble search for universal truth and knowledge. It is deliberately subversive of the foundations of Western thought. What's also sad about it is that many young people learn this jargon in an eager attempt and desire to glean meaning and purpose from it, and are frustrated and disappointed by it. I recall a young man at an animal rights conference trying to express the immorality of the way pigs are treated in factory farms using neo-Marxist jargon. He had the right idea but not the right language to express it (the correct language in this case is deontological ethics as expressed by ethicist Tom Regan). And it also led to the end of careers of professors who taught something of value; they were replaced by feminists and the like, who taught worse than nothing. This is sad for academia and for Western civilization, though I still have faith that in time it will be corrected.
The other thing your article reminds me of is two parodies of this type of academic jargon that exposed it to much deserved ridicule. In 1996, physicist Alan Sokal submitted a paper, "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity". It was "liberally salted with nonsense" and flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions. The paper was published. Later, in 2017-2018, three scholars (James Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose, and Peter Boghossian) submitted 20 fake papers to top journals in gender, race, sexuality, and cultural studies. Several were accepted, including one that argued dog parks are "petri dishes for canine rape culture" and another that rewrote sections of Hitler's Mein Kampf in feminist jargon. These are called the Sokal Affair and Grievance Studies Affair.
Interesting comment, thanks. Butler makes an appearance in my article on postmodernism, which you might enjoy (link below). A lot of what you describe is intellectual fraud, which Roger Scruton covered brilliantly in his book Fool's Frauds and Firebrands. Have you read it?
I was familiar with the Mein Kamp parody, but not the "petri dishes for canine rape culture". Amazing.
The funniest incident I had with this was an animal rights conference about 15 years ago. We showed up by bus at around 8 a.m. and I expected, at the very least, coffee to be provided. It was not, and there were no coffee shops in the area. That was bad. I ran into the organizer, one Anothony Nocella II, and asked about it. Instead of saying, "gee I'm sorry we didn't plan for that:, he instead launched into a monologue on "critical pedagogy", using words like "discursive" and "intersectional." How he tied that into the lack of coffee wasn't quite clear to me. This guy: https://www.anthonynocella.org/ self-described as "intersectional, collaborative social justice total libertarian queer disability hip hop lowrider scholar activist."
I should add that not all those who believe in animal rights, such as myself, subscribe to Leftist intersectional nonsense. I am very much against it and think that animal rights & welfare, which is a legitimate ethical issue, has been harmed by it. Anyway, later on, another "scholar-activist" with a man bun expressed unhappiness with my thesis and also used the same postmodern jargon. When I think back on it, it could have been the basis for an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm.
My wife, at Warwick Uni (a hotbed of this shite) early 80s, came across a friend reading Derrida.
"Do you understand it?" she asked.
"You are not meant to understand it" he replied. A remarkably astute observation for one so young.
At Oxford '69 to '72, Warwick was a hotbed of Leftist revolurionary bollocks. Even worse than my alma mater. My sideline was psychedelics, far more consciousness expanding 🥰🥰🥰
Good article, which raises a question. If you were to attempt to persuade me that Kant, Heidegger and Wittgenstein are worth the effort, what would you say? (Note: I come from a science background, with little background in the humanities or philosophy, and, so far, tend to think that coming to questions from the perspective of science is by far the better approach; but I’m also open to arguments otherwise.)
I am right now editing Thus Spake Zarathustra. This is what I do for fun in retirement.
For the record, it's pretty darn clean. Nietzche's translators use Elizabethan pronouns and verb conjugations to make it sound more complex than it really is.
I'm also switching all the references to make it female-based instead of male. Thus, we get Woman, womankind, and the Superwoman, as well as the advice from the old man:
I have not read him for about 40 years, but the idea I took away from the Kant section of Philo Class was that what we receive through our senses is not the "thing in itself" out there. I could totally buy this proposition, as long as we assume that the sensory stimulation we are receiving is responsive to a reality that IS out there.
Kant's ideas are basically consistent with what we now know about the role of the brain in interpreting incoming stimuli. Even so, I have come to see Kant's ideas as a chisel that fractured a rock. Competing philosophers who wanted to be more radical and original could question outer reality itself and attract attention that way.
I often think if you have something important to say, it makes sense to communicate in a way that is legible to most people. Your ideas travel further and have more influence that way.
I often thought two things:
• As you point out - sometimes using a great deal of unnecessary academic jargon is a way of avoiding scrutiny. If no one can really understand what you are saying, you don't have to justify it. It intimidates people into assuming you must be smarter than them.
• Social signalling - I am part of an elite club. If you don't understand what I am saying, that is because you cannot keep up.
I think there is a strong element of both. It is a shame and rather sad that people would be annoyed when you edited their essays. It suggests they felt they needed to present their work that way to appear legitimate. It isn't healthy. Maybe it becomes about social acceptance - proving you are smart enough to speak the language of the club.
It sounds like a terribly tedious job. I would be rolling my eyes into the back of my head all day 😅😅
Yes, exactly. As I wrote about Judith Butler, "If you cannot understand the argument, you cannot challenge it. It’s impenetrable by design, immediately creating an in-group privy to the codes who nod along and delight in excluding and intimidating the out-group."
It was tedious in some ways. At other times, satisfying – especially if the topic was interesting.
"Common sense. Honesty. Seeing through the BS and calling it out." My thoughts exactly. If I want to understand something about any cultural or political moment, I'll turn to the plumber over the 'Head of Strategic Partnerships and Global Impact' any day of the week.
I've been an editor since I was trained in journalism in the late 1970s. I worked for years in journalism and technical writing, before spending the last 13 years of my career as an independent editor of fiction and narrative nonfiction.
I LIKE cutting big words and jargon onto the cutting-room floor.
I LIKE replacing them with simple, common-sense words.
I LIKE rearranging the sentences to use those simple, common-sense words in the simplest, most common-sense way.
Communication!
What a concept!
The worst people I've ever edited were computer engineers. Layer onto the contempt for communication held by those young men--who think the only necessary form of language is the IF/THEN loop--the infinite sense of male entitlement of one of the most highly-paid male-dominated industries in the world (I majored in computer engineering for three years before I realized the teenage boys and self-satisfied male professors I studied with were NEVER going to accept me as a peer, and more than one of the woman-hating men financing the transgenderism lobby made his massive fortune in computer tech). . .and you get the most insufferable shits you could ever hope to get.
I love the power of language. I always have, and I always will.
And I LIKE making those insufferable shits look like idiots.
Thanks for reading. I hope it was clear and passed Orwell's own test (for the most part). If this is your first time here and you found this piece interesting or useful, do subscribe and click the article 'like' button – it helps others see it.
I think your subliminal meta-narrative juxtaposes the semiotic contextualization underpinning the autonomous and hierarchical frameworks of temporally-based sub-linear structures of modality with the dominant sub-schema of contingent re-actualizations of homological meaning in a problematically consanguineous fashion.
I think I've just broken my head. Need to lie down.
Great piece, by the way.
It's like you took the words out of my mouth, Rudolph.
My brain needs a new software implant to begin to comprehend any academic word production.
That means it's working.
Language in general has been captured by aliens. You can read most corporate websites and afterwords ask yourself,” What exactly does this company actually do?”
Thanks for pointing to Orwell's essay, which was humbling to read and is a wonderful guide to clearer prose. It is astonishing that 80 years ago he observed: The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’.
He's the gold standard for clarity, including moral clarity. I try to make a point of reading that essay every year.
I also re-read Tom Wolfe's "Radical Chic" about once a year, reporting at Leonard Bernstein's upper class fundraiser for the Black Panthers. Not just for moral clarity but also to laugh out loud.
Perhaps the language is often so complex because it tries to hide the truth instead of unraveling it (although there is no such thing as 'the truth' according to postmodernists)
Yes, that's the argument in a nutshell.
I agree. Many if not most cults create jargon and private languages that only the members are privy to.
That being said, I also attribute obscure writing to the author's refusal to perform the communication project she has assigned to herself. She does not want her readers to understand what she is saying, which is the entire purpose of writing. In the case of philosophers, I wonder if such a tendency reflects some personal oddity that is endemic to university philosophy departments.
I found essays on anthropology hard. The sentences were so long that by the time you reached the verb, you had forgotten the subject. I am old now, but I love to read anything other than the output of people infected by critical theory. The next time I read such an obfuscated essay, I will take your lead and simplify it. If any meaning remains, I'll send it to the author. Reading you, Frederick, is like drinking from a clear spring. I feel so much brighter afterwards. Thank you!
Thanks, Bob – very kind of you.
You'll have this same experience with Marcel Proust and Henry James.
But once you learn to chop those long sentences up into short declarative statements, you'll discover whether the author actually had anything to say or not.
Ah, the good old weaponization of language: confusing you with verbiage so you think you're not clever enough to understand, in the hope you don't discern the holes in the argument.
It is my experience that when a theory or an idea are really, truly robust, they can usually be boiled down - even if this errs on the side of oversimplification - to a paragraph, or even a single sentence.
When the idea is sound (it does not even have to be morally correct, just a sound argument) it can be distilled to very few words. Thus Schopenauer: It's all about the will for power. Marx: It's all about capital. Libertarianism: As long as nobody gets hurt, do what thy will. etc. etc.
When you scrape away the stucco, even the most ornamental baroque structures should be based on straight lines
I appreciate your distinction between difficult writing that says something abstract but meaningful, e.g. Kant and Heidegger, and difficult, obscure writing that says nothing most or all of the time. The one that comes to mind is Judith Butler, whom I was forced to read in grad school. Interestingly, she is the intellectual ancestor of modern trans ideology and also happened to be an anti-Israel Jew -- both terrible forms of Leftism. I also studied Kant and Heidegger, and it took me about three months of daily reading with each to really understand them, but once I did, it was rewarding because they pointed to something important and real. What they said was worth the effort. Not so with those who used neo-Marxist sociological jargon (as distinct from legit sociologists like Peter Berger). Nothing lies beneath it.
But it's actually worse than saying nothing. The problem with this sort of writing is not just that it wastes your time but that it's been used to undermine the older and more noble search for universal truth and knowledge. It is deliberately subversive of the foundations of Western thought. What's also sad about it is that many young people learn this jargon in an eager attempt and desire to glean meaning and purpose from it, and are frustrated and disappointed by it. I recall a young man at an animal rights conference trying to express the immorality of the way pigs are treated in factory farms using neo-Marxist jargon. He had the right idea but not the right language to express it (the correct language in this case is deontological ethics as expressed by ethicist Tom Regan). And it also led to the end of careers of professors who taught something of value; they were replaced by feminists and the like, who taught worse than nothing. This is sad for academia and for Western civilization, though I still have faith that in time it will be corrected.
The other thing your article reminds me of is two parodies of this type of academic jargon that exposed it to much deserved ridicule. In 1996, physicist Alan Sokal submitted a paper, "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity". It was "liberally salted with nonsense" and flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions. The paper was published. Later, in 2017-2018, three scholars (James Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose, and Peter Boghossian) submitted 20 fake papers to top journals in gender, race, sexuality, and cultural studies. Several were accepted, including one that argued dog parks are "petri dishes for canine rape culture" and another that rewrote sections of Hitler's Mein Kampf in feminist jargon. These are called the Sokal Affair and Grievance Studies Affair.
Interesting comment, thanks. Butler makes an appearance in my article on postmodernism, which you might enjoy (link below). A lot of what you describe is intellectual fraud, which Roger Scruton covered brilliantly in his book Fool's Frauds and Firebrands. Have you read it?
I was familiar with the Mein Kamp parody, but not the "petri dishes for canine rape culture". Amazing.
https://www.gadflynotes.com/p/postmodernism-the-idea-that-ate-itself
The funniest incident I had with this was an animal rights conference about 15 years ago. We showed up by bus at around 8 a.m. and I expected, at the very least, coffee to be provided. It was not, and there were no coffee shops in the area. That was bad. I ran into the organizer, one Anothony Nocella II, and asked about it. Instead of saying, "gee I'm sorry we didn't plan for that:, he instead launched into a monologue on "critical pedagogy", using words like "discursive" and "intersectional." How he tied that into the lack of coffee wasn't quite clear to me. This guy: https://www.anthonynocella.org/ self-described as "intersectional, collaborative social justice total libertarian queer disability hip hop lowrider scholar activist."
I should add that not all those who believe in animal rights, such as myself, subscribe to Leftist intersectional nonsense. I am very much against it and think that animal rights & welfare, which is a legitimate ethical issue, has been harmed by it. Anyway, later on, another "scholar-activist" with a man bun expressed unhappiness with my thesis and also used the same postmodern jargon. When I think back on it, it could have been the basis for an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm.
My wife, at Warwick Uni (a hotbed of this shite) early 80s, came across a friend reading Derrida.
"Do you understand it?" she asked.
"You are not meant to understand it" he replied. A remarkably astute observation for one so young.
At Oxford '69 to '72, Warwick was a hotbed of Leftist revolurionary bollocks. Even worse than my alma mater. My sideline was psychedelics, far more consciousness expanding 🥰🥰🥰
"You are not meant to understand it". Perfect.
Psychedelics taught me more about reality than Kant, Heidegger, and Nietzche combined.
SOAS - School of Anti-Semitic Studies
That's the one.
Good article, which raises a question. If you were to attempt to persuade me that Kant, Heidegger and Wittgenstein are worth the effort, what would you say? (Note: I come from a science background, with little background in the humanities or philosophy, and, so far, tend to think that coming to questions from the perspective of science is by far the better approach; but I’m also open to arguments otherwise.)
Good question, and a huge one. I'll have a think about that get back to you.
I am right now editing Thus Spake Zarathustra. This is what I do for fun in retirement.
For the record, it's pretty darn clean. Nietzche's translators use Elizabethan pronouns and verb conjugations to make it sound more complex than it really is.
I'm also switching all the references to make it female-based instead of male. Thus, we get Woman, womankind, and the Superwoman, as well as the advice from the old man:
"When you speak to men, bring a whip."
I have not read him for about 40 years, but the idea I took away from the Kant section of Philo Class was that what we receive through our senses is not the "thing in itself" out there. I could totally buy this proposition, as long as we assume that the sensory stimulation we are receiving is responsive to a reality that IS out there.
Kant's ideas are basically consistent with what we now know about the role of the brain in interpreting incoming stimuli. Even so, I have come to see Kant's ideas as a chisel that fractured a rock. Competing philosophers who wanted to be more radical and original could question outer reality itself and attract attention that way.
Love this article!
I often think if you have something important to say, it makes sense to communicate in a way that is legible to most people. Your ideas travel further and have more influence that way.
I often thought two things:
• As you point out - sometimes using a great deal of unnecessary academic jargon is a way of avoiding scrutiny. If no one can really understand what you are saying, you don't have to justify it. It intimidates people into assuming you must be smarter than them.
• Social signalling - I am part of an elite club. If you don't understand what I am saying, that is because you cannot keep up.
I think there is a strong element of both. It is a shame and rather sad that people would be annoyed when you edited their essays. It suggests they felt they needed to present their work that way to appear legitimate. It isn't healthy. Maybe it becomes about social acceptance - proving you are smart enough to speak the language of the club.
It sounds like a terribly tedious job. I would be rolling my eyes into the back of my head all day 😅😅
Yes, exactly. As I wrote about Judith Butler, "If you cannot understand the argument, you cannot challenge it. It’s impenetrable by design, immediately creating an in-group privy to the codes who nod along and delight in excluding and intimidating the out-group."
It was tedious in some ways. At other times, satisfying – especially if the topic was interesting.
That Orwell quote is brilliant.
"unclear writing is almost never an accident. It’s a technique"
Deliberately complex to confuse and to convey intelligence and authority.
It's why I love the ability of working class people to cut through that kind of bs by saying what they see.
People who know you can't trust Keir Starmer because he pretends to not know what a woman is.
If somebody can lie to you about something so fundamental, they can lie to you about everything else.
That's why this government hates the working class, pubs and free speech.
Common sense. Honesty. Seeing through the BS and calling it out.
The emperor's new clothes.
I love this article by the way.
"Common sense. Honesty. Seeing through the BS and calling it out." My thoughts exactly. If I want to understand something about any cultural or political moment, I'll turn to the plumber over the 'Head of Strategic Partnerships and Global Impact' any day of the week.
I've been an editor since I was trained in journalism in the late 1970s. I worked for years in journalism and technical writing, before spending the last 13 years of my career as an independent editor of fiction and narrative nonfiction.
I LIKE cutting big words and jargon onto the cutting-room floor.
I LIKE replacing them with simple, common-sense words.
I LIKE rearranging the sentences to use those simple, common-sense words in the simplest, most common-sense way.
Communication!
What a concept!
The worst people I've ever edited were computer engineers. Layer onto the contempt for communication held by those young men--who think the only necessary form of language is the IF/THEN loop--the infinite sense of male entitlement of one of the most highly-paid male-dominated industries in the world (I majored in computer engineering for three years before I realized the teenage boys and self-satisfied male professors I studied with were NEVER going to accept me as a peer, and more than one of the woman-hating men financing the transgenderism lobby made his massive fortune in computer tech). . .and you get the most insufferable shits you could ever hope to get.
I love the power of language. I always have, and I always will.
And I LIKE making those insufferable shits look like idiots.
Good to have a fellow editor in the comment section.
Heidegger stands apart.
But for this mere mortal, the
"meaning of being" is simple, jt is - to be.
I am I... as Yahweh once said. Not to mention, Popeye as well.
I yam what I yam!
Great description of Will Self.
God. Extraordinary BORE