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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?"
Another widely reported exploration into post-modernist literature was "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" by Sokal. Sokal says, in order to "test the prevailing intellectual standards, I decided to try a modest (though admittedly uncontrolled) experiment: Would a leading North American journal of cultural studies -- whose editorial collective includes such luminaries as Fredric Jameson and Andrew Ross -- publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions? The answer, unfortunately, is yes."
Crikey!
The Army reading list
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.
In eleventh grade, I wrote my term paper on The Hobbit. Part of the assignment was to provide literary criticism of the work. I cited sources that stated how JRR Tolkien HATED allegory and reading deeper into works and therefore claimed I didn't need to provide any literary criticism of the Hobbit. My teacher bought it and I got an A. Tolkien rocked because he felt literature should be taken at face value.
Isn't it interesting how you come to recognize posters based solely on their sigs???
You haven't been around any English departments, have you? My wife has an MA in English, and it sounds like the department was pretty vicious.
I'd argue that it's a lot harder being in a field with "soft" realities. Anything you say is subject to criticism, and it's really hard to "prove" you're right. I'll take an objective field, where I can demonstrate truth or falsehood irrefutably, any day. (I know that's an overstatment: you can always debate the meaning of experimental results. But you get the idea.)
Happens all the time in meetings everywhere. The boss says something totally wrong and the room is silent.
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.
Q: What do you get when you cross a Post Modernist with a Mafioso??
A: An offer you can't understand.
afterwards I'd wondered if we were talking the same language.
The first case was with a techincal support representitive with a large company that had migrated alot of their after-hours support staff off site. (The company rhymes with Crisco, the off site location rhymes with blindia.)
I'm not in any way being critical of the country of origin, and I _know_ this person was speaking in english...but we weren't talking the same language. Curiously, his emails were completely understandable...it was the verbal conversation I couldn't grok.
The second was a meeting of high level Government IT staff, and some other members of government to discuss centralizing Internet services. Things were going well as we all introduced ourselves and stated what we wanted to get out of the collaboration. Then a lady came to the floor and spoke very eloquently for a good five minutes.
I have no clue what she said.
I asked about her afterwards and it turns out that she was a) a lawyer, b) an elected representative, and c) a manager.
Pretty much a lit crit Trifecta!
Naturally the group dissolved after a few meetings when it was determined it was too little too late and the existing issue too complex to put in one box.
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
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.
Consider the following paragraph from the article:
Now read an essay by the postmodernism generator. Can you tell the difference? ;-)
Wouldn't it be nice to work in a field where nobody can say you're wrong?"
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").
I've always wanted to throw one out of a plane over China, and yell after them as they plummet to their death: "how are you finding that Far-Eastern Gravitation?"
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
This text is several years old, at least. In fact, the wayback machine puts it at about 5 years old.
Come on guys, you know this is really, really old.
*everything* is Orwellian to cats.
The article says:
"Another minor point, by the way, is that we don't say that we deconstruct the text but that the text deconstructs itself."
In soviet russia, perhaps.
Baz
>> 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
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.
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
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
That paper used lots of big words and I didn't understand it at all, so it must have been written by really smart people!
"Wouldn't it be nice to work in a field where nobody can say you're wrong?"
Choose software engineering, then. There is no known defence against the "It's not a bug, it's a feature" counter attack.
in said scene, a literary critic develops a program to count the frequency of words in a given book (ignoring prepositions, pronouns and the like) and then display the 20 most and least frequent words. the theory is that the core concept of the book can be gleaned by simply reading these lists.
now i have tried this myself and can say, while it does not work to the level stated by calvino, it does certainly give you a feel for the book. different genres have noticable word distributions especially. it's easy to identify, say, a western or sci-fi or romance novel from these lists.
2 1337 4 u!
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...
Wesley Phoa has written a good text called
Should Computer Scientists Read Derrida? that i can only recommend. Unlike the usual Deconstruction-Bashers that don't bother to understand what Deconstruction is about, this text, written by mathematician, is pretty clued up!
As an avid reader, I have to say that this entirely true. But then again, deconstruction is not about being intellectual. It's about SEEMING intellectual, when in fact all you are doing is rewriting somebody else's work using the tersist means possible. In short: deconstruction is creative writing for essayists. It is a tool for those learning how to write. And expecting something so masturbatory to be anything more than a bit of clever fun is going to result in anti-intellectual rage.
When you deconstuct a work, you create a paper which is impossible to fail on a theoretical basis, because each deconstruction is in fact its own theoretical entity. It's very hard to say, objectively, that a deconstruction is "wrong." And therefore, in the eyes of many professors, your grade on this paper can only be judged on its logical progression and its written style.
In short: deconstructions can be interesting, can be fun, and show off a person's analytical and prosaic talents. But no, they aren't going to further the "intellectual" pursuit of writing. But this is no different from a forensics meet, where people argue a position they themselves may not hold, to showcase their oration and research talents. This is no different from a poetry slam or rap battle, where people read disconnected passages to gain a subjective edge over other poets. And it's certainly no different from engineers engaging in robot battles, code obfuscation contests, or blog entries about how literary criticism is bullshit.
Incidentally, while deconstructionists can never be wrong because they write their own assumptions, literary critics in general CAN be. In fact, one of my favorite exercises in my 350 level discourse class was to rebutt a literary criticism from the New York Times magazine. Literary critics make mistakes in logic, levy unfair comparisons and make mistakes of intent all the time, and these often result in an unlikely hypothesis being legitimized. Hence the popularity of Ayn Rand!
Hey freaks: now you're ju
A nice piece of sophistry. However, when the hoax was exposed the editors of Social Text didn't take it so philosophically. They had, and there's no polite way to put this, a s**t hemmorage. They accused Sokal of mopery and dopery and aggravated intention to loiter. They claimed that he was really a right winger and that his volunteer work in Nicaragua was a lie.
Like most stuffed shirts they didn't handle looking foolish very well.
The man who never alters his opinion is like the stagnant water and breeds Reptiles of the Mind -- William Blake
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.
Although I'm not a literary critic, I am married to one, and she always disagreed with Derrida (the father of deconstruction theory, as I understand it). Interestingly enough, we had the chance to listen to him present a seminar a few years ago in Auckland, New Zealand, as he was participating in a conference sponsored by the Auckland University School of Philosophy.
So we went to listen to him speak (unfortunately not on deconstruction, but she was still very excited to have the chance to hear him). We left the Town Hall after the seminar and my wife said to me "Dammit, now I can't dislike him any more, he's so nice". A few seconds pause, then "But he's still wrong about deconstruction".
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
After some searching, I found Semiotics for Begineers, which was a pretty good introduction to the field, and written with enough clarity that even this programmer could figure out the strange language. Go give it a try.
It might also help you as a programmer. We use esoteric language all the time, like '\n', 0xDEADBEEF, deques and queues, stdout, stderr, stdlog, etc. etc., and semiotics tries to explain how these somewhat random characters can be attached to ideas, so that our community can send the characters back and forth to communicate the ideas. However, if it comes to an assembler class vs. a semiotics class, please take the assembler class.
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.
I remember an odd line in that book. At one point, reference is made (at least in the edition I was reading) to a "slime green volume". Since it's such an odd description, I inevitably began to wonder if it was a misprint, for either "lime green" or "slim green". Then I wondered if it could be an intentional misprint. Then I wondered if it wasn't a misprint, but was deliberatly placed to make the reader wonder about this. Then I thought about how clever the translator must have been if it was intentional. Then my head exploded.
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...)
Before becoming a software engineer I got a bachelors in psychology. While in college I went to a conference on phenomenology. I had taken a couple courses on the subject and thought I had a handle on it. However, the first speaker I went to was completely incomprehensible to me. Try as I might I could not put more than three sequential words of his together into anything that made any sense. At first I questioned my intelligence, but eventually I came to the conclussion that it was all a bunch of blather.
Standing next to me (it was standing room only) was a hot chick I had spoken to prior to the talk. She was looking up at him like he was the most brilliant man alive, making little nods and short buzzing noises of agreement. I wanted to have sex with her, and this led to my moral transgression.
After he was done speaking she gushed about how brilliant he was. Deep down I wanted to ask her if she could explain what gave her that impression, but instead I agreed with her. My little head was doing the thinking. I even spouted back some of the junk he had said in order to try to impress her.
No...I did not end up having sex with her. She went off to join the groupies surrounding the speaker, and I was left alone in my shame. I had helped to perpetuate the BS.
The Moore-Murphy Law: The number of things that will go wrong will double every 2 years.
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
This is the meat of the article, and, to my mind, accurately picks out that which is of value in the humanities.
As far as I'm concerned, the humanities need a major overhaul. Those majoring in english or art should have their science requirements increased beyond whatever they are now. At the same time, I think the sciency types of the world should be similarly forced to undertake a number of humanities courses. But the humanities teachers should be forced to explain themselves in terms as simple, obvious, and concise as the author did above.
Now, back to my botany studies...
Anyone who has not read Neal Stephenson's "Cryptonomicon", I recommend you borrow a copy and read the "War as Text" section about a lit-crit conference for which the protagonist is doing IT support. Dovetails nicely with the article, and is a real hoot.
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.
Derrida's perceptive reply went to the heart of classical general relativity:
Does that passage make any kind of sense at all? It's even more hilarious that the Social Text editors read this and didn't realize this was meaningless babble, just because Derrida wrote it.
The posts on this site are written by a longtime techie Stephen Den Beste, but are not the usual techie subjects. I also like his Strategic Overview of the US war on terror in general, and Iraq in specific.
Also, more techie oriented, this discussion is about the creation of a Super-human Intelligence that's probably not what you'd think it is.
I read USS Clueless pretty much every day now.
I want to a highschool where literary critism was a normal event in literature classes. I've always been opposed to this nonsense, since I started out as an artist and have heard people reading things into paintings I've done, or paintings that have been done by people I know: paintings which in many cases mean absoultely nothing. In addition, a good percentage of the art teachers I've had have taught "tricks" like blind contour drawings as basis for paintings, and using color schemes that apply a meaning even when no meaning exists.
In any case, in my softmore year, we were assigned the hobbit which we had to read, and then explain what the book was really about. Aside from having read the book several times prior to the class, I happened to have the first official U.S. priting, which had a rather extensive introductory letter by tolkien. Aside from the very beginning, which talked about how this was the first printing, and not to purchase the book from other U.S. publishers (they did not have the rights to publish it and were not giving him residuals) he went on to discuss the meaning of the book -- speciffically, the entire lack thereof. He disavowed the book being a metaphore for anything, and asked the reader to accept it for what is was - a story, a flight of fancy, a fantasy which he wrote for nothing other than the purpose of enjoyment. I photocopied the introducion, wrote a quick appology for not disecting the meaning of the book considering that I felt it would be disrespectfull of the author to read meaning into it when he has specifically asked his readers not to. I got a D-.
RandomAndInteresting.comdefending the world from stupidity since 1979
I got my bachelor's degree in English, Linguistics and CS. My senior thesis in English was intentionally written in plain, easy to understand US English. I received many, many compliments for the readability and understandability of my work from my thesis committee. The professors on my committee (a US News top-10 English Literature program) hate "postmodern" critical techniques. My father is an art professor at the same school. He detests this (as someone posted earlier) masturbatory writing style. I have a feeling PoMoLitCrit will be short lived. It is not taken seriously by anyone in the humanities who does not have something to hide academically. Please do not make the error of using a few academically dishonest, mistakenly tenured morons to judge the whole lot of us.
For more on this subject check out Richard Dawkin's article post-modernism disrobed
Also here Noam Chomksy reaches similar conclusions.
From Chomsky's comments...
So take Derrida, one of the grand old men. I thought I ought to at least be able to understand his Grammatology, so tried to read it. I could make out some of it, for example, the critical analysis of classical texts that I knew very well and had written about years before. I found the scholarship appalling, based on pathetic misreading; and the argument, such as it was, failed to come close to the kinds of standards I've been familiar with since virtually childhood. Well, maybe I missed something: could be, but suspicions remain, as noted.