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/lit/ - Literature

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2856426 No.2856426[DELETED]  [Reply] [Original]

A few months ago there was a thread where someone posted an excerpt from one of Judith Butler's speeches or essays that was so cluttered with academic jargon that it made no sense at all.

Does anyone remember the specific quote or anything like it?

>> No.2856440

>>2856426
She won a prize for most incomprehensible writing a few years ago, maybe that might help you in your search. It's quite a bigotted thing to give imo, there's no contextualization to the fragment cited. If a philosopher builds up an argument, they're bound to introduce concepts that are incomprehensible outside of that frame.

>> No.2856439

Breaking News: Academia has specific terms of art

>> No.2856447

>>2856440
yeah, i found it.

http://denisdutton.com/bad_writing.htm

some others there. pretty funny. this Roy Bhaskar sentence that adds "ian" to every philosopher's name and lazily throws in philosophical terms is probably the worst sentence I've ever read.

>> No.2856525

>>2856447
jesus fuck... Look, I dig some Judith Butler, but that one sentence is just fucking HORRIBLE.

>> No.2856551

The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.

>> No.2856559

>>2856551
Judith, Judith... you're making a FOOL of yourself. You can do so much better! All of these pomos can do better, but they don't! Nietzsche was right!

>> No.2856561

>>2856551
I have no problem reading this. /lit/ changes a man, woman, and everyone in between or outside of that sex binary.

>> No.2856566
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2856566

read Totality and Infinity by Emmanuel Levinas.

>> No.2856567

>>2856551
>>2856561

That's just a shitty sentence altogether. She's making it difficult-to-follow for the hell of it. The worst of academia, illustrated perfectly. Fuck that bitch.

>> No.2856593

>>2856567
>She's making it difficult-to-follow for the hell of it.
She's made it very easy to follow, in fact. If you're unfamiliar with anything she's even given you enough information about where the idea has come from and what interpretation she's using. It's nicely structured too, clearly contrasting the move from convergent to contingent using the rhetorical device of parallelism, which also helps to reemphasize the end point of rearticulation.

>> No.2856607

>>2856593
no

like, she has a point, and i get what her point is. but it is impossible to argue that the point required that level of density or obscurity or complexity to get across. she could have made the same point in a more immediately accessible way, instead of in the most scholastic style possible. it's medieval, is what it is.

>> No.2856615

>>2856607
It isn't a point, it's an explanatory sentence. Description, not conclusion.

>> No.2856616

>>2856567
it's not "for the hell of it". it's a combination, i suspect, of 1) it is the accepted style within that social system and threfore seems natural and 2) there are good self-interested reasons for her to do so. it makes good sense for her, career-wise, to use the highest, most obscure and inaccessible and academic language possible.

>> No.2856628

You know what's more frustrating than a professional using language that his/her colleagues will understand given the context? It's when dumb asses assume that taking a quote out of context in a professional work should be expected to make sense to the layperson.

>> No.2856639

>>2856551
>>2856561

I too have no difficulty with this. You need to know a lot of history of philosophy to know what she's talking about just as you'd need to know a shit ton about science to have any idea what an academic science publication is talking about.

>> No.2856666

>>2856639
Sciencey stuff can be worse.

>When input signals change more than occasionally, this analysis in terms of components of the state diagram isn't very helpful, because the components themselves are only defined with respect to particular constant signal conditions.

Chapter 2, nowhere near the worst line in it either.

>> No.2856673

ok check your etc...
/thread

>> No.2856686

>>2856673
If that's a reference to the forced tumbler bs, Judith Butler is against the ideas behind the whole cis-privelege thing.

>> No.2856691

>>2856686
yeah didn't the sb in that dyke fight video scream Judith Butler at the end?

>> No.2856694

>>The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.

>>mfw I actually understand what she is talking about... that doesn't mean that I approve of the way she phrases it or that I think that either of the two approaches she is describing is particularly lucid, but I understand what is going on. I'm not even sure whether this is something to be proud of or whether it just shows how much time I have wasted studying these kinds of things...

>> No.2856703

>>2856639
>>2856628
>>2856616

I'm not referring to the content, I'm referring to the style. It's abstruse and complicated for no good reason. She could perfectly well have broken that sentence up into smaller chunks, which would facilitate getting her point across, seeing as humans can only really handle 6-7 mental items simultaenously, and that at a stretch.

>> No.2856707

seems apparent she didnt edit

>> No.2856710

isn't it that long because the stream-of-concious like refinement?

>> No.2856711

>>2856703
It's maybe a little jarring because they've taken a sentence from the middle of a paper and presented it cold. So you don't have that "flow" as it were as when reading the paper.

>> No.2856833

c'mon, she only decided to phrase into one sentence cause she wanted to convey a sense of a changing continuum of theory. Maybe she could have broken it up into clauses a little more comprehensibly. Spivak is much worse, even people like Eagleton on the side of theory would agree.

>> No.2857474

>>2856833
No, these guys are right. People should use bitesize sentences if they want to say something substantial. Only people who have nothing to say, like Hitchens are allowed to say it in longer sentences, because substantial long sentences make my brain hurt and I forget what I'm reading.