promethea.incorporated

brave and steely-eyed and morally pure and a bit terrifying… /testimonials /evil /leet .ask? .ask_long?

nostalgebraist:

@socialjusticemunchkin, did you coin the phrase “dogma of mandatory comprehensibility” for your NAB review, or does it have some earlier provenance, in your writing or somewhere else?  It’s a phrase that captures something that has frustrated me about deconstructionist (and similar) criticism in the past, and it’d be nice to be able to use it without referring people back to this particular kerfuffle.

Specifically, the frustration I have is that in order to identify “holes” in a text, places where a text “undermines itself,” or the like, it seems to me like you first need to ask the usual questions like “does this make more sense in historical context?” or “does it work to read this as meant ironically?”  I.e. the kinds of questions you usually find non-deconstructionist critics asking when confronted with aspects of a text that confuse them.

And it would be fine if any given deconstructionist had asked the usual questions and simply found the answers wanting, but in the cases I’ve read, they often don’t.  The (unintended?) implication is then that “if it doesn’t make immediate sense to a late-20th or early-21st century college professor, it doesn’t make sense.”  When, you know, that college professor’s viewpoint is not only not omniscient, but (more specifically) conditioned by the public morals and idea systems of their society in ways which they may not be aware of, since that’s how such things tend to go.  (I wonder if Foucault ever got on the deconstructionists’ case about this?)

(Note: I have a rule of not talking about NAB, but this post doesn’t count as talking about NAB by my standards)

As far as I know it’s my OC, and fresh to this particular incident.

The basic idea has been bugging me longer though, tying to the more general pattern I’ve observed of people yelling about things because they don’t realize they don’t speak the same language and thus assume that an expression in rationalist!english means what the same words mean in liberalartist!english, give a reasonable response to their misconception in liberalartist!english and speakers of rationalist!english are like “lol wtf are these guys talking about”, and in the end both sides hate each other for the horrible sin of speaking the Wrong Dialect.

(And the general pattern kind of applies in a lot of uncharitable readings; most snarky nitpicking would lose its effect if one were to read things in the writer’s dialect instead of one’s own; and no matter how much fun said snarky nitpicking is, it’s not at all fair. (Yes, I sometimes do it myself too, feel free to yell at me if you catch me doing it unless I’m clearly aiming for a non-serious&honest approach.))

1 month ago · tagged #basilisk bullshit · 56 notes · source: nostalgebraist · .permalink

  1. almostcoralchaos reblogged this from nostalgebraist
  2. hpgross reblogged this from nostalgebraist
  3. nostalgebraist reblogged this from aprilwitching and added:
    But here we want to talk about different academic ways of speaking that all may seem equally formal (they may all appear...
  4. socialjusticemunchkin reblogged this from geekwithsandwich
  5. witandmirth reblogged this from aprilwitching
  6. aprilwitching reblogged this from geekwithsandwich and added:
    this is a very good addition, which also reminds me of that joke about being able to tell what someone studied in...
  7. geekwithsandwich reblogged this from socialjusticemunchkin and added:
    Hello Rationalist Tumblr™, I’m here via @aprilwitching, and I just wanted to jump in with a little linguistics. I...
  8. laropasucia reblogged this from socialjusticemunchkin
  9. theaudientvoid reblogged this from dagny-hashtaggart and added:
    Social Sciences and History were in the same building at my university. Said building was also concrete brutalist...
  10. dagny-hashtaggart reblogged this from nostalgebraist and added:
    IME history tends to be more aligned with the social sciences than the humanities in terms of departmental organization...
  11. speakertoyesterday reblogged this from socialjusticemunchkin and added:
    So I attended a small Baptist liberal arts college in Chicago (this is a standard joke about the place). We read a bunch...