Social Text issue

[Joe Varo]

On Fri, 24 May 1996, Aaron Yeater wrote:

> 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.  

This is pretty much my take on it.  As an individual with a college 
degree in philosophy & english I used to consider myself fairly able to 
keep up with "jargon" of lit crit/decon and kept up a subscription to 
_Critical Inquiry_ and _Philosophy & Literature_.

Eventually I came to feel that, no longer being in an academic 
environment, I was somehow losing ground and comprehension ability as the 
writing in these journals became more and more "quirky".  And then there 
is all of the reference to Lacan, a guy I still have yet to figure out.

But I still try to keep up with new stuff by Derrida et al when I find 
it, though I cancelled my subs to the above journals.

>                                             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...
> ***********************************************************
> 
> Aaron C. Yeater
> Staff Assistant
> Web Master
> Innovations in American Government Program
> http://ksgwww.harvard.edu/~innovat/
> Cambridge, Massachusetts
> 
> 

Joe
vjvaro at erie.net