Comments on: The War On (some kinds of) Theory

By: tim

tim — Thu, 18 Dec 2003 23:11:28 +0000

“Surely the burden of proof is on those who claim that the jargon is meaningless?” Perhaps. But there are plenty of people out there asserting it, and a few people out there testing it. Everybody and their uncle likes to mock the nonsense that comes out of the MLA conference. And this discussion started precisely because people have been assaulting the “bad writing” of theory. Whatever you think of Alan Sokal and his dirty trick, it did demonstrate the point. (Do you think if you wrote a simulated-jargon filled particle physics paper and submitted it to Phys Rev Letters, that you would make it past the referees?) It doesn’t help either that the defenders can’t make a clear case for the defense. (One of the editors of Social Text went so far as to say that Sokal’s paper was legitimate, Sokal’s claim that it was a hoax was a hoax.) This discussion isn’t going on in a vacuum, it’s going on in a landscape littered with pretentious sounding nonsense that is propagated under the name “Theory” and which is attacked as nonsense from many sides. So now is time for those theorists to answer the charges – if they can. There isn’t the same skepticism about particle physics – and there is very likely a good reason for that.

By: Tim F

Tim F — Thu, 18 Dec 2003 20:08:02 +0000

So you say. But others disagree. That’s exactly the point that has to be proved… Why does it ‘have to be proved’? Why does literary theory have a special obligation to demonstrate that its technical terms are genuine, an obligation physics or economics or analytic philosophy apparently do not have? Literary theorists are generally intelligent, serious people (and often, like Judith Butler, capable of writing very clear, jargon free, prose, when they wish to); they appear to be able to communicate with one another using their jargon. Surely the burden of proof is on those who claim that the jargon is meaningless? If I were to claim that particle physics was pretentious jargon, would my disagreement mean that physics had to prove to my satisfaction that all it’s jargon were meaningful?

By: Matt Weiner

Matt Weiner — Thu, 18 Dec 2003 17:47:16 +0000

Force means something different in the technical jargon of physicists than in the common language. That’s the point of a technical jargon. “Charm” and “strangeness,” even more so. But “solid” wasn’t meant to be a jargon term—it was supposed to mean exactly what it means in the common language. That it turned out not to, I think, indicates that physicists were able to work for a long time with a term that was not clearly defined. As for “endurance” and “perdurance”—those are obviously jargon terms, defined stipulatively. But take “vagueness.” Philosophers don’t seem to be able to agree on what “vagueness” really means—ask Brian Weatherson, who has a very controversial definition. I guess pretty much everyone agrees that “bald” leads to issues of vagueness, and vagueness can be vaguely defined by saying “cases like ‘bald’”; but that leaves a whole lot of room for disputes about definitions. Yet it’s pretty clear to me that analytic philosophers aren’t BSing (always), and often do make progress toward getting clear on concepts. It’s not clear to me that critical theorists aren’t BSing, partly because I haven’t read enough of them. (Foucault and Adorno certainly weren’t, though.) But I’m reluctant to condemn them without more study.

By: dsquared

dsquared — Thu, 18 Dec 2003 17:21:59 +0000

Would you be prepared to stake much on the question of whether quantum physicists use the term “observation” in a consistent manner? The point is that you’re looking at the wrong comparision with scientific jargon. The scientists use unambiguous language to describe things which is possible because things are unambiguous. When scientists describe what they do, they use terms like “observation”, “experiment”, “significant”, “effect” and a number of other terms which are as ambiguous and philosophically complex as you like. The distinction is easy to miss, because in criticism, the “things” that you’re writing about are the same as “what you’re doing”.

By: tim

tim — Thu, 18 Dec 2003 16:43:47 +0000

“Literary theorists … do ‘have something specific, something generally agreed upon by their fellow practitioners, and something fixed behind the meanings of the words they use.’” So you say. But others disagree. That’s exactly the point that has to be proved to show that what they are up to is not just obscurantism but proper use of a technical jargon. “’Deconstruct’ has a particular technical meaning coming from Derrida (depending on his claim that implicit assumptions necessarily lead to internal contradictions in any statement) – it isn’t just a synonym for ‘analyse’.” Not according to one of the literary theorists’ defenders in this debate. The equation of deconstruct with analyze isn’t my claim.

By: umair

umair — Thu, 18 Dec 2003 16:12:57 +0000

Cool debate. I think math is the cap on the modelling crutch because the epistemology and ontology of economics don’t really exist (or at least never really got sorted out). Luckily, simulation and behavioural methods are building a new epistemology for economics. Then again, I’ve always noticed an inverse relation between the insight I got from an econ paper and the amount of math it contained.

By: Tim F

Tim F — Thu, 18 Dec 2003 12:46:08 +0000

Literary theorists (or, perhaps, different schools of literary theory) do “have something specific, something generally agreed upon by their fellow practitioners, and something fixed behind the meanings of the words they use.” ‘Deconstruct’ has a particular technical meaning coming from Derrida (depending on his claim that implicit assumptions necessarily lead to internal contradictions in any statement) – it isn’t just a synonym for ‘analyse’. Likewise ‘desire’ in Deleuze (and Deleuze-inspired criticism), or ‘the real’ in Lacanian psychoanalysis. Using these shorthands makes it easier, not harder, to communicate. Indeed, I think this would be a good challenge for the Bad Writing crowd: choose a theorist and write something either about them or using their critical methods, without using their terminology. I don’t think you’ld have to write very much before you discovered the value of this jargon – it’s certainly possible to find a synonym for ‘ontology’ when writing a Heideggerian critique of Hobbes, say, but it’s difficult and, if you’re writing for an audience who knows what the terminology means, an uneccessary waste of your time and theirs, and, by cluttering the text makes it harder to follow the actual argument.

By: tim

tim — Wed, 17 Dec 2003 19:26:42 +0000

Of course. Force means something different in the technical jargon of physicists than in the common language. That’s the point of a technical jargon. You can find an analogy in any academic discipline. (Analytic philosophy: endurance and perdurance as kinds of persistence.)

By: Matt Weiner

Matt Weiner — Wed, 17 Dec 2003 18:54:23 +0000

So why can’t we expect literary theorists to have something specific, something generally agreed upon by their fellow practitioners, and something fixed behind the meanings of the words they use? Quick unfair response: Consider scientific terms such as “fish,” “solid,” and “mammal.” People turned out to be surprised by what these terms really mean; for instance, solids are substances with a certain crystalline structure, and glass turns out not to be a solid. So the meaning wasn’t completely fixed, and yet it was a good term for a’ that. (I have an analogy in mind with something in analytic philosophy, but it’d take too long.)

By: tim

tim — Wed, 17 Dec 2003 17:27:49 +0000

Look, the same is true of physics and biology. Everyone can agree on the proper usage of “cell,” or “mitochondria,” or “photon,” or “quark.” You won’t find a biologist describing a human being as a cell or a virus here, and an axon or amphibian or tuber there. And you won’t find a physicist calling those things inside protons sometimes quarks, sometimes electrons, sometimes molecules, or sometimes planets. And you won’t find a chemist using the word “Carbon” but meaning sometimes Scandium, sometimes Phosphorus, and sometimes graduated cylinder. So why can’t we expect literary theorists to have something specific, something generally agreed upon by their fellow practitioners, and something fixed behind the meanings of the words they use? I’m not asking this of literature, where ambiguity may well be a virtue; I’m asking this of academic analysis, where it is not. It’s clear that language in general is up to the task, “indeterminacy of meaning” not withstanding. After all, many, many academic fields carry on a fruitful theoretical dialogue – not just math. Surely you don’t think it is impossible to communicate clearly about literature. It was done for centuries before literary theorists adopted obscurity as a virtue. I see only two possibilities: that what the obscurantists want to say cannot be communicated in language, in which case they should shut up about it already; or that it can be communicated in language, in which case they should take the trouble to do it clearly. While the ideas of most academic fields aren’t easily communicated using the only the ordinary language of laypersons, this is precisely why they have developed rigorous technical jargons. And this isn’t out of reach for literary criticism – those people concerned with the rhetorical structure of texts have a considerable technical vocabulary available to them (see, for example, =A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms= by Richard Lanham).

By: dsquared

dsquared — Wed, 17 Dec 2003 16:19:15 +0000

Look, there’s no great trick to finding out what the jargon of math means Yes there is. This was what the entire formalist project was about; finding a way of doing mathematics without having to agree on what the terms “mean” (what kind of an entity is a “set”, for example?). It’s only possible in maths because the formal language of mathematics is “formal” in the literal sense; it’s a set of rules for making marks on paper which defines theorems and nontheorems without reference to the (semantic) meaning of those marks. That’s just not going to be possible in a field where the semantic content is important, which brings one face to face with the indeterminacy of “meaning”.

By: Zizka

Zizka — Wed, 17 Dec 2003 14:20:51 +0000

I spent a couple years in ~1979-81 or so reading Foucault, Derrida, Lacan, and their sources. I ended up concluding that Foucault had a lot to say, Derrida may have had something to say, and that Lacan was a fraud. Rather than writing difficult ideas in a difficult way, I feel that Lacan and the Lacanians are playing an elaborate insiders game of peekaboo, and that none of the key words and phrases used have definite meanings such that if you understood them, you’d understand what was being said by Lacan et al. I further ended up believing that the obscurantism was deliberate. It can always be said that I was resisting the message or that I didn’t try hard enough. There are still some people who say that about astrology too, for example, but I just don’t have the time to study astrology in detail either. I suspect that if I knew more math I would find out that some of the math is used for obscuratist reasons. I know that within the profession many say that models are being “refined” even though they’ve become completely detached from the actualities they supposedly are “about”. But since I don’t know enough math, I don’t know which medels these are or when abuse is taking place. The general idea that mathematical analysis is a useful tool for economists seem unassailable. On a different thread someone apparently quite knowledgable told me that the use of intimidating statistical presentations to dress up mushy results is a recognized problem. I also suspect that a lot of the technical language in the DSM-4 has a lot more to do with insurance payments and defending malpractice suits than it does with either prevention, treatment or discovery of causes of disease.

By: tim

tim — Wed, 17 Dec 2003 13:13:09 +0000

I can’t see how begging the question enters into it at all. Look, there’s no great trick to finding out what the jargon of math means, and that the meaning is stable. Why isn’t this possible for literary theory? Can’t we see if the usage implied in one instance is consistent with usage in another? Can’t we look for agreement among the practitioners on a well defined meaning? Where is the begging of the question in that?

By: dsquared

dsquared — Wed, 17 Dec 2003 07:25:33 +0000

But you can discover whether the obscuring words in literary theory are an honest technical jargon by trying to determine if there is a consistent, well-defined meaning for the terms At the risk of repeating myself, I don’t believe that you’ll find it possible to do this in a non question-begging way.

By: roublen vesseau

roublen vesseau — Wed, 17 Dec 2003 06:07:36 +0000

I'm pretty sure some of you have read them, but Krugman has written a *lot* on economic methodology. Two of my favorite pieces are: The Fall and Rise of Development Economics> and A country is not a company