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?"

Comments

Other way round

[CompressedAir]

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.

self-eating watermelon

[sohp]

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.

Re:self-eating watermelon

[Lemmy Caution]

Anyone who invests the time can learn the skills of criticism. Not unlike programming, math, or physics.

I've heard engineers brag "well, if I just sat around reading Tolstoy and Doestoevsky and Heidegger and writing about it, I could be a literary critic, too!" To which the only sensible response is that if one (I was about to say "I", but, in fact, I did, so there's no if) studied mathematics and physics, I could be a physicist. In other words, duh.

Engineer's Disease

[gowen]

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.

Re:Engineer's Disease

[*weasel]

ad hominem attacks are always much easier than providing a refutation of the issues brought up.

but of course, one of his criticisms of the field is that the people within it do not care to ever explain anything to people who do not know their jargon, nor do they ever feel it necessary to defend questions of their field with explanation. but that's truly a crticism of the people who work in the field, not the ideas and tenets of postmodernist literary criticism itself. and it's just as valid a critique of engineering in most cases. The dismissive superiority, the aloofness, it's not helpful.

the primary thing the author was pointing out is the postmodern logic trap: when everything is subjective, there can be no objective, logical measure for correctness or quality -- which is unique in all academia, and distinctly foreign to engineers.

Truly this is not even a critique as much as a giant warning sign that conventional logic isn't helpful in this territory. He may be implying a value judgement on this aspect, but if the reader isn't feeling defensive, there's no reason to consider it as vicious, superior, or confrontational.

The entire piece was just a tongue-in-cheek barb toward the other academic extreme pointing out: "hey, if you guys don't learn how to communicate your ideas to the rest of us, we're going to make fun of you the way you all make fun of us."

ironic that the objective extreme should quarrel with the subjective extreme, over which side is too isolated from the bulk of society.

Re:Engineer's Disease

[Jerf]

Try the Sokal articles.

It is not the engineers thinking they understand everything; it is the engineers demonstrating that the lit crits understand nothing technical, and arguing by extension that the odds of them understanding anything in their own field, absent evidence to the contrary, seem to be very, very low.

It is also a disease to think that you must be an "expert" in something to have any sort of valid opinion. The fact that dedicated attempts by smart people with no agenda and an honest intent to find meaning in postmodern lit-crit have failed is a strong indictment that can not be waved away with "Oh, they're not experts", and merely provides more fuel for the idea that lit-crit is full of crap and rather then demonstrate some sort of meaning, they must resort to ad-hominem to defend it.

Note that engineering disciplines can indeed meet that criteria; even if you don't understand math you can see there's something there. Even if you don't understand structural engineering, you can see buildings that stand vs. those that don't. (Consider the recent earthquakes in California and Iran, with similar magnitudes but vastly different outcomes.)

These people aren't making appeals to authority, they aren't standing on their "engineering creds", they're demonstrating pointlessness. It would be a fallacy to claim "I am an engineer, therefore their writing is pointless." But they are not doing that; they are saying "After a serious attempt to find meaning in these writings, we have failed and have been forced to conclude there is none." You want to prove otherwise, you need to produce the unabiguous "meanings" for these sentences; "our" side has done its work (as I am with these guys).

Indeed, if anyone is guilty of assuming competence, it is these lit folks, literally attempting to re-write the world so that engineering and science are just "another point of view", all the while willfully failing to understand why they are different.

The engineering and science toolkits are perfectly applicable to the task of analyzing lit-crit. The failures of the analysis must be laid at the feet of the lit-crit, not the techniques.

Grow up, branch out. Experts are just people who have studied something for a while, and they may yet be wrong. Nothing prevents an engineer from being an expert in something else, too. Stop pigeonholing people and stop suffering from "expert disease", OK? It's not good for any of us, because you can vote.

Re:Engineer's Disease

[mellon]

the primary thing the author was pointing out is the postmodern logic trap: when everything is subjective, there can be no objective, logical measure for correctness or quality -- which is unique in all academia, and distinctly foreign to engineers.

Truly this is not even a critique as much as a giant warning sign that conventional logic isn't helpful in this territory. He may be implying a value judgement on this aspect, but if the reader isn't feeling defensive, there's no reason to consider it as vicious, superior, or confrontational.

It's a legitimate warning, but in the real world every experience is subjective. So there is in fact no objective determination of right and wrong for the bulk of what we do. In hard science, you can refute a theory through experimental results, but you can never confirm a theory other than by saying that it matches all known facts and has yet to be refuted. In this sense, you can say that hard science is objective.

However, most of what is interesting in the world is subjective. Is this a nice GUI? Subjective. Is this art good? Subjective. Is this food yummy? Subjective. Is this food good for me? Most likely subjective, unless it contains things that are poisonous to all humans, or contains no nutrients. I thrive on a vegetarian diet, and my wife is allergic to tofu (well, soy). Ultimately, food will kill you.

So while we can poke fun at academics who live in a subjective world, with some justification, there really isn't a solution to the problem. The bulk of what matters in the world really is subjective. It's fun and invigorating to work in the part of the world that seems not to be subjective (e.g., engineering), but thinking that things that are subjective aren't is actually a major trap into which we can fall. E.g., management theories that are supposed to always work. Programming techniques that are supposed to always work. Civil Liberties paradigms that are definitely correct. More and bloodier wars have been fought, etc. :'}

One of the keys to living a happy life is learning to differentiate between things that are subjective and things that are objective, and not treat things that are subjective as if they are objective. And, by the way, logic is an extremely important tool in this domain. It's just that you have to apply the logic - it's not objective. Not objective doesn't mean not logical.

The real paradox of postmodern deconstructionism (really, of all discourse - the Indian pandits talk about this, as did the Buddha) is that at the same time that it presents the world as inherently subjective, the very act of deconstruction implies that the product of the deconstruction is objectively valid - otherwise, why bother? Yet if every topic of discussion is subjective, this implies that communication is impossible, and clearly it's not. It's a very interesting paradox to try to understand.

Jargon

[Nadsat]

>> 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.

Re:Jargon

[Nadsat]

Good literary critisism, in an academic sense, is not concerned with publishing to a Disney audience. Or writing executive summaries. Sure, if the intention is to reach out to a larger audience, then yes, avoid more idiosyncratic words.

But in the example the author cites, he was at a meeting with literary people who try to push the limitis, go to the edge of thought. To go to the forefront, you must use specific words. The author probably felt, "Hey I don't understand the cutting edge. Instead of learning the jargon, I will attack the whole system."

Einstien could not have mathamatically argued relativity if he was required to us simple math for the average joe.

Re:Science

[Petronius]

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.

Just a reminder...

[melquiades]

Not to defend deconstuctionism too much -- because I really do think that it's a field with a lot of bullshit in it -- but it's important to keep in mind that every, every field can sound incredibly stupid if you don't have all the jargon, context, background, and indoctrination that it requires.

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:

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. There is, I think, a grain of truth in this accusation. Defenders frequently counter with arguments about how what we do really is technical and really does require precise language in order to talk about it clearly. There is, I think, a substantial bit of truth in this as well, though it is hard to use these grounds to defend the use of the term "grep" to describe digging through a backpack to find a lost item, as a friend of mine sometimes does. However, I think it's human nature for members of any group to use the ideas they have in common as metaphors for everything else in life, so I'm willing to forgive him.

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):

Every day I have to explain what I do to people who are different from me -- marketing people, technical writers, my boss, my investors, my customers -- none of whom belong to my profession or share my technical background or knowledge. As a consequence, I'm constantly forced to describe what I know in terms that other people can at least begin to understand. ... Contrast this situation with that of academia. Professors of Literature or History or Cultural Studies in their professional life find themselves communicating principally with other professors of Literature or History or Cultural Studies. They also, of course, communicate with students, but students don't really count. ... What you have is rather like birds on the Galapagos islands -- an isolated population with unique selective pressures resulting in evolutionary divergence from the mainland population. There's no reason you should be able to understand what these academics are saying because, for several generations, comprehensibility to outsiders has not been one of the selective criteria to which they've been subjected.

I wonder what we might learn if comprehensibility returned to the equation. There are a lot of very interesting ideas buring in academia.

an academic speaks

[bigbigbison]

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.

Re:My favoritest paper ever!

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

In case you missed this...

[Ayanami Rei]

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.

Re:Another exploration into post-modernist literat

[Otter]

Here's what I never got about that Sokal business: the core principle of post-modern criticism is that there is no priviliged reading of a text, even the author's, right? So what's the fuss about a "hoax"? The editors perceived something worthwhile in the article, and Sokal has no standing to insist otherwise, even if he is the author.

I don't get why no one seems to have made that argument. It came to my mind within seconds of hearing the story.

Re:Science

[molafson]

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.

Re:Science

[Walter Wart]

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.

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 :-) Applying value judgements like "better" clouds the issue, and so on.

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.

Wouldn't be nice at all

[pileated]

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.

Re:Another exploration into post-modernist literat

[October_30th]

I like to apply that concept to art.

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.

Re:Another exploration into post-modernist literat

[urbazewski]

What I appreciated about the article here, as opposed to the one by Sokal, is that rather than just dismissing the entire enterprise he makes a genuine attempt to understand what's going on and to see what has merit and what doesn't. Also, the analysis of how the incentives for academics work was right on target --- he didn't say that humanties professors are morons, they are just doing what they rewarded for, responding to incentives they face.

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.

Re:Another exploration into post-modernist literat

[random735]

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)

Re:Another exploration into post-modernist literat

[Jerf]

No, he made the argument and he meant it. Under their rules it should not have bothered them that he did not mean it.

If the Social Texteditors find my arguments convincing, then why should they be disconcerted simply because I don't?

It did bother them, thus it is valid to speculate about why. (My call is "hypocrisy", but that's just one interpretation. I can't prove it without access to the editors I don't have.)

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...)

Hey! That's *my* field! (Or close to it.)

[Snafoo]

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.

Good article, with a caveat

[noewun]

I'm a writer, and a pretty good one -- got the degree and everything. The school I attended was one of the most radical Writing programs in the country, along with U Wisconsin Madison and a few others. Because of this, I got a fairly good exposure to Postmodern Theory and Practice and developed a pretty good dislike for it. My problem is not with the theory itself, which is, like any culturally situated theory, fun and interesting to play with and something which can lead you to think about things in a new way.

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.