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

Another exploration into post-modernist literature

[glinden]

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."

An article on "Deconstructing Deconstructionism"

[tcopeland]

...can be found here:

Deconstruction is a theory that is beyond being intellectually bankrupt -- it is intellectually meaningless and thus had no intellectual capital to begin with!

Crikey!

My favoritest paper ever!

[Kulaid982]

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.

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.

Cut-throat literati

[Ktistec Machine]

Wouldn't it be nice to work in a field where nobody can say you're wrong?

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.)

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

[jandrese]

Indeed, at the beginning of the article he even explains how he read the basic fundamentals of the field to determine weather or not there was any merit to the whole process. In doing so, he discovered that the whole exercise was not as difficult as first appeared and proceeded to explain in laymens terms how the whole thing works. That's why its a great article.

What do you get ...

[MonkeyBoyo]

Q: What do you get when you cross a Post Modernist with a Mafioso??


A: An offer you can't understand.

I've had two conversations in my life in which

[Matey-O]

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.

Must see link

[arvindn]

Postmodernism generator

Consider the following paragraph from the article:

The essential paradigm of cyberspace is creating partially situated identities out of actual or potential social reality in terms of canonical forms of human contact, thus renormalizing the phenomenology of narrative space and requiring the naturalization of the intersubjective cognitive strategy, and thereby resolving the dialectics of metaphorical thoughts, each problematic to the other, collectively redefining and reifying the paradigm of the parable of the model of the metaphor.

Now read an essay by the postmodernism generator. Can you tell the difference? ;-)

Science

[Aardpig]

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?"

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.

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.

Wow, this is *old*

[EnVisiCrypt]

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.

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:an academic speaks

[niko9]

Remember, 90% of everything is crap.

You're absolutley right. 90% of the patients I treat are total crap. They could have easily called a cab for their day old cough and sooner be in the ER, than called 911, get up from bed, unlock the door, crawl back into bed, and wait for the medics to find them in bed as if they are really sick.

90% of all the craps you take in you lifetime are also crap, the other 10% being explosive diarrhea, which is just really latin for brown water.

What's the point of this post? Well like 90% of all slashdot comments, it's crap, that will soon get moderated by people who waste their time modertaing crap!

Holy crap, that's alot of crap! We're swimming in it like a sea, which by the way....

--

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

[drooling-dog]

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!

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:An article on "Deconstructing Deconstructionism

[dasmegabyte]

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!

Re:Another exploration into post-modernist literat

[Walter Wart]

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.

Re:Another exploration into post-modernist literat

[Jerf]

I was going to RTFA you, but I note Sokal's followup has not been linked yet. In it, he makes the following statement:

Of course, I'm not oblivious to the ethical issues involved in my rather unorthodox experiment. Professional communities operate largely on trust; deception undercuts that trust. But it is important to understand exactly what I did. My article is a theoretical essay based entirely on publicly available sources, all of which I have meticulously footnoted. All works cited are real, and all quotations are rigorously accurate; none are invented. Now, it's true that the author doesn't believe his own argument. But why should that matter? The editors' duty as scholars is to judge the validity and interest of ideas, without regard for their provenance. (That is why many scholarly journals practice blind refereeing.) If the Social Texteditors find my arguments convincing, then why should they be disconcerted simply because I don't? Or are they more deferent to the so-called ``cultural authority of technoscience'' than they would care to admit?

Perhaps this will resolve your misunderstanding on why "no on seems to have made that argument"?

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

[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

[Slamtilt]

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.

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.

War as Text

[weav]

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.