Social Text issue

[Aaron Yeater]

i have to say though, i appreciate the physicist's joke...I think he 
was less critiquing the philosophical position of relativism (which 
can & should be attacked philosophically, but on its own terms...) 
but instead critiquing the esotericism of academic writing, 
particularly in the lit crit field.  Whether a scientist or 
philosopher, there is a sense in which academic writing too often 
seeks to insulate itself from the practical world, as well as from 
criticism, by writing in an arcane dialect.  What does Foucault say 
of Derrida's writing?  it is the "terrorism of the obscure" (or 
somesuch...)  Social Text is a terrible culprit of this phenomenon, 
and so are most science journals--the same joke could be played in 
reverse, suggesting that gravity works in reverse by speaking in 
equations and theorems (in fact, if one takes an ironic view, such a 
joke has been played--it was called "The Bell Curve," in which a 
ridiculous and specious proposition--the intellectual inferiority of black 
people due to genetic factors--was given credence because of an 
infinite set of complicated tables, graphs and time series 
regressions.  But the best academic writers in different
fields--Fish, Duncan Kennedy, Steven Jay Gould, Foucault, Robert 
Reich, Kenneth Arrow, Derrick Bell, Lynn Hunt, Henry Louis Gates, etc.--write 
outside their specialization...it's not as much an insult to the 
inquiry as to the mode of expression...
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Aaron C. Yeater
Staff Assistant
Web Master
Innovations in American Government Program
http://ksgwww.harvard.edu/~innovat/
Cambridge, Massachusetts