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Engineer Deconstructs Literary Criticism
DNS-and-BIND writes "This is the story of one computer professional's explorations in the world of postmodern literary criticism. Wouldn't it be nice to work in a field where nobody can say you're wrong?"
Step 1 -- Select a work to be deconstructed. This a called a "text" and is generally a piece of text, though it need not be. It is very much within the lit crit mainstream to take something which is not text and call it a text. In fact, this can be a very useful thing to do, since it leaves the critic with broad discretion to define what it means to "read" it and thus a great deal of flexibility in interpretation. It also allows the literary critic to extend his reach beyond mere literature. However, the choice of text is actually one of the less important decisions you will need to make, since points are awarded on the basis of style and wit rather than substance, although more challenging works are valued for their greater potential for exercising cleverness. Thus you want to pick your text with an eye to the opportunities it will give you to be clever and convoluted, rather than whether the text has anything important to say or there is anything important to say about it. Generally speaking, obscure works are better than well known ones, though an acceptable alternative is to choose a text from the popular mass media, such as a Madonna video or the latest Danielle Steele novel. The text can be of any length, from the complete works of Louis L'Amour to a single sentence. For example, let's deconstruct the phrase, "John F. Kennedy was not a homosexual."
Step 2 -- Decide what the text says. This can be whatever you want, although of course in the case of a text which actually consists of text it is easier if you pick something that it really does say. This is called "reading". I will read our example phrase as saying that John F. Kennedy was not a homosexual.
Step 3 -- Identify within the reading a distinction of some sort. This can be either something which is described or referred to by the text directly or it can be inferred from the presumed cultural context of a hypothetical reader. It is a convention of the genre to choose a duality, such as man/woman, good/evil, earth/sky, chocolate/vanilla, etc. In the case of our example, the obvious duality to pick is homosexual/heterosexual, though a really clever person might be able to find something else.
Step 4 -- Convert your chosen distinction into a "hierarchical opposition" by asserting that the text claims or presumes a particular primacy, superiority, privilege or importance to one side or the other of the distinction. Since it's pretty much arbitrary, you don't have to give a justification for this assertion unless you feel like it. Programmers and computer scientists may find the concept of a hierarchy consisting of only two elements to be a bit odd, but this appears to be an established tradition in literary criticism. Continuing our example, we can claim homophobia on the part of the society in which this sentence was uttered and therefor assert that it presumes superiority of heterosexuality over homosexuality.
Step 5 -- Derive another reading of the text, one in which it is interpreted as referring to itself. In particular, find a way to read it as a statement which contradicts or undermines either the original reading or the ordering of the hierarchical opposition (which amounts to the same thing). This is really the tricky part and is the key to the whole exercise. Pulling this off successfully may require a variety of techniques, though you get more style points for some techniques than for others. Fortunately, you have a wide range of intellectual tools at your disposal, which the rules allow you to use in literary criticism even though they would be frowned upon in engineering or the sciences. These include appeals to authority (you can even cite obscure authorities that nobody has heard of), reasoning from etymology, reasoning from puns, and a variety of word other games. You are allowed to use the word "problematic" as a noun. You are also allowed to pretend that the works of Freud present a correct model of human psychology and the works of Marx present a correct model of sociology and economics (it's not clear to me whether practitioners in the field actually believe Freud and Marx or if it's just a convention of the genre).
Wouldn't it be nice to work in a field where nobody can say you're wrong?
That's a field where everyone says you're wrong about everything.
The author shows terrific mastery and use of the rhetorical literary deconstruction techniques he derides. In other words, he couldn't have written the article without the very skills and work he criticizes.
Engineer's Disease has claimed another victim.
"engineers disease": The delusion because you're ubercompetent in your chosen field, you're automatically an expert on everything else.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Actually, everybody can say you're wrong. They just can't prove it.
>> We engineers are frequently accused of speaking an alien language, of wrapping what we do in jargon and obscurity in order to preserve the technological priesthood.
I don't like where he went with this. The argument is that postmodernists speak with such obscurity, that they wrap themselves into an island. And that what they really say is just intellectual masturbation. Sure. Of course. Doctors, programmers, lawyers... all have this.
Personally, why not use words specific to the field? I don't think dumbing down should be encouraged. Learn the jargon, it doesn't take that long to do. Read a few theory books. Properly used, $0.50 words should not be labeled as 'jargon,' but simply as words to help facilitate communication into the edge of thought.
The Custom Mary
Unfortunately, the postmodernists have attempted to apply their idiotic claptrap to science, claiming the existence of such absurd concepts as "alternative scientific truths".
religions have done just that for thousands of years... yet no one seems to complain.
there's no place like ~
Most subtle, nuanced statements are going to sound pretty stupid if you render half the words meaningless and remove their context, which is exactly what happens when an outsider hears the language of some specialized field. It's very difficult for outsiders to judge the legitimacy of a field from the outside.
I see this all the time in the general public's reactions to both software and science, especially theoretical physics and medicine.
The article's author actually says this really well:
He goes on to draw what I think is a really useful conclusion (much more insightful than most of the posts on this thread, I'm afraid):
I wonder what we might learn if comprehensibility returned to the equation. There are a lot of very interesting ideas buring in academia.
I was prepared for a philistine reaction to a barely-understood domain, but instead the piece was earnest, honest and clear-eyed.
Most cultural studies academics are aware the problems of empty jargonizing, a reaction to it set in a while ago, and things are getting better. Part of the problem is that critical theory in practice is just that - practice, not new research, in working with texts. There's the same sort of inflationary pressures going on with people trying to make their work look as important as possible.
But there's a great deal of baby in the bathwater that's being thrown out. Sokal's best contribution was the recommendation that a metaphor used in criticism should be more, not less, accessible than the subject of the metaphor (if you're using x to explain y, x should be more, not less, comprehensible than y).
Ultimately, it should also be recognized that art, literature, and culture are a different type of domain from physics, even if it sometimes borrows its rhetoric. In one way, however, there's a similarity: the claim that there's "no right answer" in criticism is only true in the way that "nothing is ever proven true, only not yet falsified" in empirical science. In both cases, although in different ways, it's about comparing models.
As soemone who is getting thier Phd in a liberal arts field, let me just say that in reality, like any other field 90% of the stuff I read is crap. Once you get to the graduate level and move beyond the stuff that is famous in a field you will see how little good quality stuff there really is out there. I just started this last semester on my phd. I am finding that in my classes here at my new university, a good 75% of the assigned readings are either the exact same articles that I read in my masters program, or just articles that have the same ideas as other articles I've already read. While there are dozens of journals publishing papers every months, there is really just a very small finite amount of work that is really noteworthy.
In doing my personal research there have been lots and lots of books where I shook my head and asked myself how this could have been published. The same is true of conferneces. I've been to a handfull of academic conferences and it never fails that the vast majority of the papers presented are pointless or trivial. (Certainly there may be people who saw my paper and thought the same thing, who knows). Thus it is not surprizing that the conference discussed in the article was full of crap.
So lets not jump on academia and say it is ALL a bunch of crap. Yes 90% of it is but how is that any different than any other field. How often are there articles about incompetent tech support, or IT guys who just totally screw up simple things? Remember, 90% of everything is crap.
http://www.popularculturegaming.com -- my blog about the culture of videogame players
Wouldn't it be nice to work in a field where nobody can say you're wrong?
If you're advanced enough in any field this can be so.
As long as your code works a bit, it isn't wrong, just not robust, or sub optimal.
Then you and your teacher should be sent back to school. Tolkien, in his preface to LOTR, wrote that he hated allegory - NOT that he hated people "reading deeper" into his story. In particular, he said that his stories should be read as mythology and not as allegory. In allegory, the story is supposed to represent something specific (e.g Animal Farm, an allegory of the Bolshevik Revolution). Allegory does not allow multiple interpretations. Allegory has a single meaning determined by the author.
In mythology, however, the story can be freely interpreted (e.g. creation myths, fall-from-grace myths, hero myths). Mythology allows people to read deeply into it and interpret the story according to their own desires. The meaning is determined by the reader, not the author.
Tolkien's beef with allegory is that the story is subordinate to what it alludes to. Myth has no such "deficiency".
Of course Tolkien intended readers to "read deeply" into his books. They are not "light reading" or pulp, they are carefully crafted retellings of heroic myths which can be interpreted a myriad of ways. The whole point of myth is for people to "read deeply" into it.
The article really isn't about deconstructing the humanities at all. That was the method the author used to expose the deeper problem: that the humanities are suffering because their most artful practicitioners have isolated themselves and no longer respond to the community.
One thing he didn't really emphasize, but only alluded to (in a paragraph where he admits how this thinking caused him to understand why it might be important to conisder the fraility of many kinds of writing) is that these humanitarian skills are really useful! Only undergrads aren't really shown what they could do with them in the real world, besides branching off into various fields of media criticism.
He should have driven his conclusion home harder... that academia needs a slap upside the head, and we ("Nerds") all could help a little.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
I don't get why no one seems to have made that argument. It came to my mind within seconds of hearing the story.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Unfortunately, the postmodernists have attempted to apply their idiotic claptrap to science, claiming the existence of such absurd concepts as "alternative scientific truths". What they miss is that science is empirical, and therefore deals with observed characteristics of the real world (i.e., "facts").
There is such a thing as an overcommitment to the validity of truth in science -- i.e. so that existing scientific theory becomes ossified and dogmatic, leading to ad hoc theoretical additions, rather than the continual scrutiny of theory needed for advancement.
Also, philosophic enquiry into scientific epistemology (how science "knows" things) -- e.g. why we identify theory with truth when theory proves to be tenuous, why competing theories are developed using identical observation, etc. -- is interesting and beneficial.
As the author of the piece points out there is a germ of something useful in lit-crit. It's important to know what someone's hidden assumptions are and to figure out what's not being said.
:-) Applying value judgements like "better" clouds the issue, and so on.
In science hidden assumptions can bite you on the ass. Let's take an example from biology. Strict Darwinian "wedging" or Biblical Creationism. Those are the choices. Given the amount of time that life has existed you simply can't have two species competing in the same niche. The better, fitter one would have already driven the more poorly adapted one to extinction. Therefore we must reject evolution in favor of the Bible's explanation.
Anyone who understands anything about basic evolutionary biology will immediately be able to poke large holes in the argument. The dualism is false. There are many other possibilities. Strict adaptationism, while not actually a crime, is certainly a major character flaw
The history of science and engineering provides thousands of examples.
What is not said and what is assumed change the character of the discussion.
That's the useful germ. The problem, as the author of the piece points out, is that the critical theorists have spent a long time talking to themselves without having to interact much with outsiders and in fields where there are no reality checks from the outside.
The man who never alters his opinion is like the stagnant water and breeds Reptiles of the Mind -- William Blake
If you can't get things right, only the soft field is accessible to you.
If you can get things right then the sciences are wide open to you but you'll still have the same fight as anyone else in the "arts".
In college, I consistently received C's for my English papers (I was a math major taking some English courses.) I had to explain some of the issues of the Vietnam War to a friend (since they don't seem to learn about it on their own). She turned in her paper having written what I said verbatim and received and A, with several notes complementing her excellent points. It should be noted that she was an English major.
In college, History majors reguarly received higher grades for inferior work in the History dept. It was a lot like watching the empire building that goes on in corporations.
Anyhow, it's the academic types that prosper in college in this fashion that go on to be the literary critic. Then again maybe I'm just bitter because I'm a white male and therefore don't have anything to contribute but lies and oppression.
t
Curiously, his emails were completely understandable...it was the verbal conversation I couldn't grok.
I wonder why that would be? It's like you were speaking an entirely different language.
Modern literary criticism is like long drawn out hari-kari. Who knows why anyone would torture themselves with it. It reminds me of many years ago when I went back to college for an MFA in painting and happened to also take a cross-disciplinary course in literary criticism. My first degree had been in English and I'd decided not to pursue it because it just seemed fatuous, completely unrelated to the world I live in. Well anyway I'd hadn't been in this cross-disciplinary seminar for more than 10 minutes before my head started spinning and I had this horrible feeling of deja-vu, stuck in fatuous neverneverland, where anything could be said but nothing could be proved or disproved.
It's sort of like all code can only consist of goto statements and you spend all your time chasing your tail trying to find out what something really means, or where it gets its value. You can't because there'e nothing concrete there. Every goto goes to a new goto. The buck stops nowhere.
I suppose someone might be able to enjoy this but I think that the best artists and the best programmers eventually realize that total freedom is total chaos. There have to be some truths/constants/final variables/whatever. From there you can build something worth building.
The message the artist tries to convey - either consciously or subconsciously - to the audience is secondary. Art should reflect the essence of the audience - not the artist - back to themselves. Does my work make you happy? Great - why do you think that is? Does it make you hopping mad/afraid/sad? Fantastic. What is it inside you that made you react in such a way?
Great art always shows you something surprising (and not necessarily pleasant) about yourself.
Needless to say, this interpretation of art got me in a world of trouble in the literary class in high school where we supposed to learn the message of a painting or a poem by reading about it.
The owls are not what they seem
>Wouldn't it be nice to work in a field where nobody can say you're wrong?
.
Interesting comment from someone who is presumably an engineer . . .
You know what lit-crit types often say about engineering types begind closed doors?
"Engineers aren't educated -- they're *trained*"
My understanding is that this is a misinterpretation of Tolkien. He disagreed that his stories were Allegory, because he felt that Allegory would have a direct one to one correspondence between elements in the work of art and what every is being referenced. I don't think he minded looking for deeper meaning, but specifically what he didn't like was, for instance, people sayign that the ring REPRESENTED this specific thing or that specific thing.
-------- In Soviet Russia, "Soviet Russia" sigs hate Slashdot.
I find Sokal, on the other hand, just as much of a holier-than-thou elitist as the people he criticizes, though he's a good deal funnier.
What Morningstar claims to have found from his explorations is a few good ideas with a whole lot of shite slathered on top. That would describe many many other academic disciplines outside the humanities as well.
foldplay your photos won't know what hit them.
Let us not forget the fact that Tolkein was one of the premier antiquarians. I have a collection of his essays on Beowulf that are simply fantastic, and his works on Old English grammar and vocabulary are quite informative as well.
To say that a man so vested in academic pursuits would be against close reading is completely asinine.
i think that's his point. If they (the editors) really believe that there's no privileged reading, then they shouldn't care that the author came out and said "haha! it's all crap!" because hey, the author doesn't matter.
However, they DID get upset...really upset. They should have made the argument "it doesn't matter that you didn't mean it, you still wrote really good stuff, intentionally or not" but they didn't.. in otherwords, they don't buy into their own philosophy (that the work is independent of its author)
The problem is that as scientists/engineers/rational people, the concept of "gibberish" has meaning. If "gibberish" is given the same standing in a journal like this as claimed "meaningful writing", then the logical conclusion is that there is no distinguishing between "gibberish" and "meaningful writing", and as a consequence there is no such thing as "meaningful writing" going on if it's all logically equivalent to "gibberish".
Thus, to be consistent, the po-mos must act as you say, but as scientists/engineers/rational people, we're not going to buy it and we're going to conclude they're full of crap. This bothers them, and again, it shouldn't since they despise our worldview so. This is what I believe Sokal was saying, and what I thought you were getting at. There's no inconsistency here from Sokal or the engineering camp, there's just inconsistency from the po-mos. (And hypocrisy, in the sense that by their own logic this isn't supposed to bother them, but it clearly does. As a scientist/engineer/rational person, I would claim this is because no matter how hard you try, you can only disconnect from reality so far...)
> using skills that are important to your
> profession for a task which is not
> useful in furthering anything but experience
Hm. To me, the battlebot thing seems to be an example of "sharpening the saw". Kind of like a baseball player taking batting practice - it doesn't score any runs, but it will later. Does literary deconstructionism serve as practice for writers?
> it is not always the best written bot
> who wins Robocode style bot battles
Sometimes, yes... but I think that's more a statement about the other bot writers' skills than the virtue of randomness. Also, a randomly constructed bot wouldn't win much, because it would probably throw exceptions all over the place. That is, there's a fair bit of order that needs to occur to produce a "random bot" - implementing the correct interfaces, choosing a random action to take, etc.
You have an interesting take on this, though. I had never considered deconstructionism as literary fun... that's a whole different viewpoint. Thanks!
The Army reading list
I'm going to start my PhD in philosophy in the fall. However, I have also worked extensively with software and software development; I've even written some stuff destined for commercial release. I can tell you that the solidity of the truth-criteria of software development and lit crit are very, very similar, and the fact that you have no clue about the goings-on at that conference of yours speaks only of a difference in field. For instance: Are more, or fewer, comments in source code desirable? How about highly-specific, tightly-optimized assembly versus a perl script? The po-mo's (and, btw, that pastiche of terminology you collected is in no way exclusively postmodern, or even, for that matter, literary) would have just as much trouble understanding the virtues of object re-use and garbage collection and multiple inheritance, and would be just as tempted to derision.
Your critique, BTW, goes much deeper, and is much less grounded than the Sokal hoax, which confined itself to apeing a particularly noisome constellation of theory; the converse of what you have done would be an attack on computer science based on the foibles of visual basic.
The upshot is: Do not be tempted to Volkisch, chauvinist rallies about your discipline. Ignorance, IMO, is fairly evenly distributed over academe.
- undoware.ca
What in heavens name are you talking about? There are a million topics that can easily be drawn out of Tolkien's work that require a close reading. Even a crass topic like "Were Sam and Frodo gay?" is worthy of discussion and requires careful reading to settle one way or another. How can you say there is no deeper significance? Even with Tolkien's flat denial the whole work is screaming out for allegorical interpretation. As they say: a fish is unaware of the water in which it swims and so is the last place to ask about water. And even at the most mundane level you can ask questions about why the story is structured one way rather than another that might require considerable work to answer.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
You can't tell the difference because the author of that paragraph constructed it in the exact same way as the postmodernism generator does, by stitching together a bunch of random phrases from literary criticism jargon. It is not an example from a serious paper, it is deliberately constructed to make fun of postmodernist academics.
Actually, the whole Sokal business was addressed, as are many of the issues Morningstar brings up in his article, in John D. Caputo's book _Deconstruction in a Nutshell_ -- a worthwhile read for anyone interested in deconstruction. (Warning: it is a philosophy text, and the "in a nutshell" part is, quite intentionally, a joke).
Deconstruction is not supposed to be a justification for interpreting a text any way you'd like. That is a common misunderstanding pervasive enough that entire schools of "deconstruction" (more aptly, "Yale School Poststructuralism") employ the strategy. Derrida and other significant contributors to the philosophy of deconstruction were after other goals. First, they wanted to propose what should be obvious to anyone who's read RMS's rants: there is always more going on behind the scenes than the author is letting on. Some of it is the author's inentention, some of it is social and cultural, and some of it is (brace yourself) generated by YOU in the reading of the text, as each time you read, you are interpreting. There is weird or particularly mystical about this assertion -- consider natural language parsing. If language was really so easy to break down, analyse and interpret in a definitive matter, why is it that NLP is still in its infancy, stuck on banal sytactical issues (like stemming) and barely capable of idetifying parts of speech?
Morningstar goes to great lengths to state that he, as a "commercial" engineer, is constantly forced to translate his language to easily understandable language. Surely, he jests. Just yesterday, I was talking to a co-worker trying to explain why one of his applications was crashing. My "easy to understand" language was not at all a real description of the problem -- were I to explain to him out-of-range errors on page lookups that led to segmentation faults in plain English, he would completely loose interest. I mean, come on, it would take easily an hour to explain to a layperson what I meant by that last comment! Jargon is necessary to identify complex (or specific) ideas in a minimal amount of words/time. It exists for engineers, philosophers, lit-critics and medical doctors -- and it exists because it has to.
Now, somewhere in this vast list of easily deconstructable comments, someone made the assinine assertion that deconstruction has no business messing with science, claiming that science is based _solely_ on empirical evidence. I thought such notions had long since dissipated. Hasn't anyone read Kuhn, Toulmin, Feyerabend or any other notable historians and philosophers of science? Wittgensteing? KANT, EVEN? Science is not built up of empirical evidence -- science is built up on theory and that theory's interpretation of evidence (which may or may not be accurate at all). 'Interpretation' is the key word, here. Thus, deconstruction, hermeneutics, and (post) structuralism most definitely ought to examine the problem. While it often escapes the notice of the casual observer, science is at a crisis point right now -- the lit-crit brand of deconstrcution can be thought of as a mirror reflecting the uncertainty of science. Science would benefit from the application of deconstruction and any other theory that might help it sort out what it means to claim that something is true, valid or meaningful. Is it possible that there are two versions of science, both true? I suppose. Maybe particle/wave theory is an example. Maybe the controversies in superstring theory are other examples. Are these indications that the universe operates in two different ways at once? Maybe, but I doubt it. More likely, it's just an indication of the argument that the deconstructionists have been making all along: language is not capable of specificity, and with jargon, social and cultural perspectives, indeterminacy of the writer and reader, etc, the quest for the grand unified theory is not possible.
However, I also noticed that Postmodern Lit Crit had become a growth industry on some college campuses, creating a whole strata of students and teachers involved in a constant circular conversation whose only purpose seemed to be the stimulation of recursion and the attaining of tenure. The theory produced some original and interesting thought, some patently ridiculous shit, and lots and lots of boring fiction. I even developed a nickname for such fiction -- MFA fiction. It's usually written by middle class white folk with little or no experience outside the ivory tower world with a condescending fascination on working class 'Merica.
This guy's onto that, and in a really good way. Unfortunately, any group produces its own symbols of group identity and people who are dependent on that group identity for everything, and just as there are people who would fold up and die if the next Lord of the Rings movie doesn't come out on DVD, there are people who, without their Masters degree and sense of superiority, would have no reason for living. The guy doesn't have the whole story, as there is some real value in all this theory -- The Matrix takes a lot from Baudillard and his postmodern work. Postmodernism is also a valuable tool for looking at cultural context, i.e., understanding the ways in which disparate cultures come together and clash. The "rootlessness" of Postmodernism is a great help here, as it is not dependent on one world view, such as earlier cultural analyses (Social Darwinism comes to mind). This aside, he has hit the bullseye on the bullshit side of modern Lit Crit.
I am a believer of momentum and curves.
using a literary version of the same cheap trick that Kurt Gddel used to try to frighten mathematicians back in the thirties.
Actually Godel's work in the 1930's had meaning, because mathematicians where looking for a way to establish an absolute consistency of a formal system. Perhaps I'm reading too much into this, but the work really was brilliant. It's really philosophy quantified in math. I can't imagine in a world where communication (english), not rigor (math) is key that semantics could be so flexible.
However, I do have one rational defense for deconstruction. We know that writers often draw from their own experiences. We also know that each of us tends to be biased when interpreting reality. So perhaps, our subconscious betrays us or little details and omissions can hint to things the author has overlooked. Although, I believe this relates more to psychology than the humanities, this may partly explain the origins of deconstruction.
Incidentally, I do get a kick out of an engineer deconstructing deconstruction. Very Feynmanesque.
EXERCISES:
Construct a deconstruction of all deconstructions including the meta-deconstruction itself. I'll leave it as a trivial exercise for the reader.
What do you mean my sig is repetitive? What do you mean my sig is repetitive? What do you mean....
The author has a lot of problems here that have been pointed out several times over, and some good points as well. One thing that seems to completely escape him is that he must apply deconstructionist techniques in order to deconstruct the particular brand of deconstructionism that he has run into. In and of itself, deconstructionism is merely another tool with which a text (yes, it is the accepted term for anything that can be interpreted) can be read (conotatively meaning "interpreted").
Think of it as a sort of reverse engineering. You break something down into component parts and try to find out how it works. One of those component parts is the author. In the case of "JFK was not a homosexual," we need to know how the author feels about the state of homosexuality; if he is homophobic, than I would say yes, it CAN be legitimately interpreted as a statement of superiority of character. It could even be taken as a statement of envy.... in the context of descibing how many women JFK had sex with, for example. However, in the context given, it is little more than a butterfly under glass. Maybe it's useful in trying to understand the author better (why this particular example), particularly in the context of understanding some of his other writing (particularly about JFK or sexuality).
You shouldn't think of deconstruction as masturbatory any more than you should think of grokking a block of code as masturbatory. Yes, it is completely possible for deconstructionist critics to move in circles in never ending battles of who has the most style in presenting their argunments, however, as I have seen pointed out here, this is a lot like obfuscated code contests (yes, both of those are primarily self indulgeant excercises). However, one of the primary reasons why arguments are so often deconstructed is to determine whether or not the person is wrong. If there is an error in logic or in fact (Like a critic making an argument based on Huck and Jim being on the Colorado River in Huckleberry Finn), a deconstruction of the argument is bound to reveal it.
As someone who spent ample amounts of time in both my college's English and Computer Science departments, I am surprised about the misunderstanding that I often here the geek crowd voice about literary/philisophical/theatrical criticism. A good body of such criticism is language based, and shares much in common with Comp. Sci's language and Machine theory.
Anyway, allow me to offer an alternative reading of the reaction to his introduction. The nods he was getting were merely encouragement from an "in-crowd" trying to be polite to an outsider who was trying to fit. The laughter was due to the fact that everyone knew the author was BSing, and when it became apparent that the author knew it too, there was nothing impolite about acknowledging the fact. Of course, to know for sure one way or the other, we would have to ask the attendees, so I suppose we'll just have to live with possible interpretations for the time being.