[!@#$%!]

Originally Posted by Glice

The problem is the logical corrolaries - YES, there are some sections of academia that are not concerned with verificationist schemas. Can you draw a broader conclusion about a whacking great slew of acadmia, including many diverse individuals, on the basis of one magazine? It seems to me like the magazine was looking for good, provocative copy, not something (yawn) academically rigorous.

My understanding of the affair is that he's highlighted some gaps in a flawed, incomplete system and drawn conclusions to the effect that all of that system is flawed. Bad logic.

Anything that threatens to apply an alien logic to Derrida is going to have a hard time, methinks.

but i think the system is fundamentally flawed, regardless of well-meaning individuals. flawed, fucked, broken, gone astray and fallen into a craphole.

may jeebus save us.

[demonrail666]

That's another point though. Lots of things can be 'wrong' without the people who conceive of them necessarily being frauds.

In the end, the principle behind that Sokal essay was no different from someone getting their five year old to do a piece of abstract expressionist painting or some improvised music in an attempt to fool an audience. It might well achieve this aim but does that necessarily render abstraction or improvisation wrong in themselves. The individuals responsible for passing that essay fit for publication are the ones that Sokal should've been attacking, not a discourse that has merely allowed them to exist.

[!@#$%!]

Originally Posted by demonrail666

That's another point though. Lots of things can be 'wrong' without the people who conceive of them necessarily being frauds

it's not error that i condemn, it's the posturing and fashionable bullshit promoted by the system itself.

it's like wallstreet trading on fucked up housing derivatives and damning pensions, governments, banks, companies-- yeah, not everyone on wallstreet is a fraud, but the system permitted and more importantly promoted the collective participation of wary and unwary individuals in a huge fraud.

it's the same in a big chunk of the humanities

j'accuse!

[Glice]

Originally Posted by !@#$%!

but i think the system is fundamentally flawed, regardless of well-meaning individuals. flawed, fucked, broken, gone astray and fallen into a craphole.

may jeebus save us.

This is Derrida at Oxford all over again: IT DOESN'T MATTER IF YOU DON'T GET IT. Your not getting it is not indicative of there being nothing to get. I'm not getting at you particularly, I'm getting at the position you're representing. It's the same with Dawkins - YES, religion has produced a lot of cack, but Dawkins by no means represents anything substantially less boorish. You don't edify the totality of one position in negating another - that's bullshit (again, this isn't at you, this is directed blindly to the aether).

[!@#$%!]

Originally Posted by Glice

This is Derrida at Oxford all over again: IT DOESN'T MATTER IF YOU DON'T GET IT. Your not getting it is not indicative of there being nothing to get. I'm not getting at you particularly, I'm getting at the position you're representing. It's the same with Dawkins - YES, religion has produced a lot of cack, but Dawkins by no means represents anything substantially less boorish. You don't edify the totality of one position in negating another - that's bullshit (again, this isn't at you, this is directed blindly to the aether).

i don't condemn things that i don't get per se, but there is PLENTY of miserablly wrong crap and utter intellectual farces where the fraud was obscured by lingo-- and i have read enough of it to know. paper after paper, article after article, photocopies galore

unfortunately the system of a big chunk of the humanities as it stands today is guilty of promoting such frauds.

yes, reading derrida is difficult, reading finnegan's wake is difficult, but it doesn't mean there is nothing to it. however, spewing idiotic gibberish and calling it joycean prose and having critics applaud is a good con job.

[!@#$%!]

part 2- and when i say the system, it's because in journals and conferences and round tables people applaud and acclaim not those who present the better arguments but those who best handle the lingo and bamboozle the audience with obscurities. they are all around and you know them.

[Glice]

Originally Posted by !@#$%!

i don't condemn things that i don't get per se, but there is PLENTY of miserablly wrong crap and utter intellectual farces where the fraud was obscured by lingo-- and i have read enough of it to know. paper after paper, article after article, photocopies galore

unfortunately the system of a big chunk of the humanities as it stands today is guilty of promoting such frauds.

yes, reading derrida is difficult, reading finnegan's wake is difficult, but it doesn't mean there is nothing to it. however, spewing idiotic gibberish and calling it joycean prose and having critics applaud is a good con job.

I'm inclined to defend the Humanities against your faint disdain towards it. Of course there's bullshit - I may have told you off the board of my experiences with one of my lecturers - but I think it's unfair to tar the whole thing with the same shitty brush. By contrast, there are literally thousands of more objectively scientific experiments taking place, often with the sort of funding that the humanities can only dream of, in which the express purpose of the experiment is to discover either fuck all or something so unlikely/ unimportant that it is precisely 0.00000001% away from meaning fuck all. I read in new scientist that the universe is A FUCKING HOLOGRAM and we're imagining the THIRD DIMENSION. UTTER bollocks if you ask me, but enough peers agree with the paper, and the research is original, so that gets passed. You see what I mean? Everything's full of shit, don't single out the Humanities.

[!@#$%!]

no no no no no. wrong! i don't have disdain for the humanities-- i LOVE the humanities. but i think the humanities have been betrayed by the caste of professional academics as a whole-- not (again) as individuals but as a whole, with their power struggles, their infernal system of rewards, and their ghettoization.

i do look forward to the day when the humanities are sane again. holy fuck, where is the new auerbach or the new george steiner-- probably unable to get tenure because he/she didn't present in 6 conferences a year.

[demonrail666]

I totally agree with you (and Sokal) in highlighting the way credible figures are used as an intellectual crutch for lesser intellects and I too see this all the time at work. My only problem is how such an observation often disguises a more general distrust of the ideas that inspired such posturing.

This isn't to say that Derrida, et al, are above criticism, but if that was Sokal's aim then I just wish he'd come out and done it, instead of taking pot-shots at those I'm sure Derrida has just as little time for as anyone else. Of course, the answer to why he didn't choose this method is that a hoax essay creates far more headlines than a reasoned critique (which, judging from his 'Beyond the Hoax', clearly isn't one of Sokal's strengths).

[Rob Instigator]

the metaverse IS a hologram, and humans function immersed in the 4th dimension which allowes for us to only see the thing in 3 dimensions, as opposed to holographically.

[demonrail666]

Originally Posted by !@#$%!

i do look forward to the day when the humanities are sane again. holy fuck, where is the new auerbach or the new george steiner-- probably unable to get tenure because he/she didn't present in 6 conferences a year.

You highlight a real problem there. Academics are (as you say) evaluated on the amount of essays and books they publish and conferences they attend, rather than the quality of their teaching. This has led to a saturation of half-baked ideas being pushed by often half-baked intellects.

Where I agree with Glice is that it always seems to be the humanities that gets the majority of criticism for this, despite the fact that it's an institution-wide epidemic rather than anything remotely discipline specific.

This is compounded by the increasing pressures put upon the humanities in general to justify themselves as a viable area of study. Funding for the humanities is being decimated (in the UK at least) to such an extent that subjects like philosophy, history of art and literature studies are in grave danger of disappearing from university prospectuses altogether. It's a vicious circle in which departments rush to publish in a bid to secure funding fully aware that what they're publishing hardly bolsters their academic credibility. My point is that it's not a problem with Derrida, or the humanities but with funding. And for Sokal to attack it from the relatively secure position of a university science department is to (i believe willfully) ignore the real causes of the problem.

The sorry fact is that a George Steiner simply wouldn't survive in a humanities programme right now and that this won't change until the people who allocate funding re-think their criteria for doing so.

[!@#$%!]

Originally Posted by demonrail666

You highlight a real problem there. Academics are (as you say) evaluated on the amount of essays and books they publish and conferences they attend, rather than the quality of their teaching. This has led to a saturation of half-baked ideas being pushed by often half-baked intellects.

Where I agree with Glice is that it always seems to be the humanities that gets the majority of criticism for this, despite the fact that it's an institution-wide epidemic rather than anything remotely discipline specific.

This is compounded by the increasing pressures put upon the humanities in general to justify themselves as a viable area of study. Funding for the humanities is being decimated (in the UK at least) to such an extent that subjects like philosophy, history of art and literature studies are in grave danger of disappearing from university prospectuses altogether. It's a vicious circle in which departments rush to publish in a bid to secure funding fully aware that what they're publishing hardly bolsters their academic credibility. My point is that it's not a problem with Derrida, or the humanities but with funding. And for Sokal to attack it from the relatively secure position of a university science department is to (i believe willfully) ignore the real causes of the problem.

The sorry fact is that a George Steiner simply wouldn't survive in a humanities programme right now and that this won't change until the people who allocate funding re-think their criteria for doing so.

holy mother fuck fuck, YES!

you've hit the nail right on the head over & over with this post.

however (however) there remains the matter of personal ethics and intellectual integrity.

the people in charge had a choice to say no, and resist the pressure, and to foster quality over quantity, but they bent over & took the financial sausage, and now they are running the equivalent of a wall street flooded with shitty housing securities, and so the roof caves and it's suddenly and endless pit of doom-- DOOOM!!!

as i was saying before, may jeebus save us.

[Rob Instigator]

what happens at the University level now is that, if a course of study does not have immediate applications to the job market, it gets dumped or ill-funded. witness the dearth of art education in the USA. the humanities are from the old sense of University, which was a place to learna nd in which you learn HOW TO learn, and a place which creates a well-rounded educated person.
nowadays ,University (in USA, I cannot speak for the UK or the world) is a mill for creating new feed for the job market. It is a bullshit thing. witness how many people graduate with "business" degrees.

[demonrail666]

Originally Posted by !@#$%!

however (however) there remains the matter of personal ethics and intellectual integrity.

the people in charge had a choice to say no, and resist the pressure, and to foster quality over quantity, but they bent over & took the financial sausage, and now they are running the equivalent of a wall street flooded with shitty housing securities, and so the roof caves and it's suddenly and endless pit of doom-- DOOOM!!!

as i was saying before, may jeebus save us.

This issue of personal ethics is a real problem. The fact is (in the UK, anyway) that a lot of academics are vain fuckers who like nothing more than to see their name in print and couldn't care less what their name's attached to. These people get promotions because of their swollen CVs and appoint other academics with the same attitude. I know a number of very good academics who are being edged out of the door by infinitely inferior ones, simply because they refuse to play that game. The whole shambles needs a complete rethink.

Originally Posted by Rob Instigator

what happens at the University level now is that, if a course of study does not have immediate applications to the job market, it gets dumped or ill-funded. witness the dearth of art education in the USA. the humanities are from the old sense of University, which was a place to learna nd in which you learn HOW TO learn, and a place which creates a well-rounded educated person.
nowadays ,University (in USA, I cannot speak for the UK or the world) is a mill for creating new feed for the job market. It is a bullshit thing. witness how many people graduate with "business" degrees.

It's exactly the same here. Courses like philosophy, art history, etc., are being forced to incorporate vocational elements into their curriculum in a way that is both impossible for staff to teach and hated by the students themselves - none of whom ever took the course as a fastrack into any kind of career. As you say, it's a complete misunderstanding of what an education in the humanities was meant to provide in the first place.

[Alex's Trip]

I'm trying to work 'pederasty' into my vocabulary, but that may require some drastic measures.

[pbradley]

I'm sure you're trying to work pederasty into more than just your vocabulary, you jailbait tease.

[Alex's Trip]

You know me too well. But not in the (biblical) sense that I want you to. <3