https://www.reddit.com/r/CriticalTheory/comments/1i68kk5/i_need_texts_for_and_against/
created by luckyamenbreak on 21/01/2025 at 02:44 UTC
19 upvotes, 11 top-level comments (showing 11)
Covid has left me, like many others, with a metabolic energy disorder that gives me frequent periods of distinctly impaired physical and mental capicity, and generally severely impaired physical and mental endurance. It gets a bit flowers-for-algernon-y in here frequently. This has given me a weird perspective on dense academic-y material. On one hand I get some of the reasons people are drawn to writing and reading that way because that was me. I can even envision situations where certain dense text is more engaging and therefore more accessible to a certain kind of person. On another hand I have newfound spite for many dense texts that have gone from "a fun challenge" to "a waste of my limited bodily resources and a literal risk to my health and quality of life". I know some concepts are inherently dense and it is dangerous to oversimplify them. But what specifically frustrates me is going through the work to understand something, and then in retrospect knowing for certain it could have been said clearer. This happens A LOT.
I would like texts that defend opacity. Mainly so I can collect reasons for why it even happens. I have thought of quite a few but I want a full lay of the land. Don't avoid giving me something that is purposefully obtuse. It might be a pain in the ass for me, like I explained above, but I would rather know about than not.
I would like texts that attack opacity, or texts that deconstruct the concept of it. Especially ones that grapple with the idea of disability seriously. I want something I can refer people to, and something I can develop my thoughts with. One concept I have been toying with is how although neological vocabulary and opacity are associated, I am a lot fonder of the former. What often gives me the most headache is not jargon - which I can easily look up - but maze-like sentence formatting that seems to instantly give me a headache.
I also welcome texts about this that aren't neccesarily about critical theory. It seems a common defense of this kind of language is "social studies are just as technical as the sciences, and deserve technical language". While I couldn't agree more, I think technical language is often further burdened by unclear writing in both social studies and the sciences. I have read far too many scientific papers where I understood everything but deeply hated the poor writing style to believe that the only problem is "anti-intellectual hatred of neologism". And I know I'm not the only one who feels this way, so there should be some material on accessible language in the sciences.
And lastly while I want to keep it civil, if you have analysis you want to give me right here I don't mind that either.
Comment by Doc_Boons at 21/01/2025 at 02:53 UTC
14 upvotes, 2 direct replies
I don't have any recommendations that you probably haven't already heard of, but I just wanted to say that I'm going through something very similar to what you're going through and it's been absolutely heartbreaking. I'm sorry it's interfering with something you seem to enjoy.
Back in 2017, when I was two years into a PhD program, I got mono and it seems to have attacked my brain, so I now have some version of what used to be called chronic fatigue syndrome but is now called myalgic encephalomyelitis. I can still read dense and difficult texts--about twenty-five pages a day, on a good day.
I had invested so much energy and self-worth into the degree that I was desperate for something that would let me work again. I found a doctor willing to give me Vyvanse for the fatigue, became addicted literally immediately, and eventually had some kind of overdose event that has further fucked up my brain.
I'm finally getting the PhD this summer--with a thin CV so no job prospects.
What I hope for both of us is that the pandemic causes a lot of money to be thrown at research for disorders like ours. Use me as an example: if you get prescribed a stimulant, be careful.
Comment by okdoomerdance at 21/01/2025 at 03:48 UTC
9 upvotes, 1 direct replies
I don't have great recs specifically for inaccessible language in critical theory but have you dipped into critical disability studies? poking around in there might get you where you're looking to go.
I'm also disabled by long covid, and disability (and mad) studies have become more and more interesting to me.
disentangling critical disability studies by dan goodley was where I got started thanks to a prof who shared a reading list from one of her classes. it's a good read. really want to read more from the list but don't have academic access anymore so it's been hard
Comment by DeathlyFiend at 21/01/2025 at 03:33 UTC
7 upvotes, 1 direct replies
"Fuck Nuance" by Kieran Healy is primary for sociology, but has continuous strands in similar fields. Even critical theory dives into sociological perspectives.
Comment by Liquid_Librarian at 21/01/2025 at 04:17 UTC
3 upvotes, 0 direct replies
It’s been a while since I read it but the things that stuck in my mind are how the exaggerated lexicon is used as a symbol of status and the awkward syntax often used in art English is inherited from translations of French post structuralist text.
Comment by loserboy42069 at 21/01/2025 at 07:47 UTC
3 upvotes, 0 direct replies
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o “Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature”
A paper with absolute bangers such as:
“But the night of the sword and the bullet was followed by the morning of the chalk and the blackboard. The physical violence of the battlefield was followed by the psychological violence of the classroom. But where the former was visibly brutal, the latter was visibly gentle … The bullet was the means of physical subjugation. Language was the means of the spiritual subjugation.”
Comment by Smol_Sick_Bean at 21/01/2025 at 04:13 UTC*
2 upvotes, 0 direct replies
This post resonates with me a lot. I have something like CFS, either from more than a half dozen covid infections, PFS (adverse, potentially permanent side effects from a specific cosmetic medication), or who knows what.
As a way to combat the condition, I began seriously reading again last year, and managed to read 35 (mostly nonfiction) books, mostly in philosophy and psychology, with some critical theory interspersed.
At its worst, I find critical theory texts to be exlusionary, obscurantist, and just simply terribly written, as if the hallmark for saying something important were determined by how many independent clauses you can fit into a half-paragraph long sentence, only to be followed by a new sentence beginning with "Or, in other words..." and then an equally opaque wall of text.
The invention of neologisms is one thing, but I think the issue is worse than that. The presumption that a new universe of meta discourse is needed to strip away our common conceptions of language, with all of its subliminal, political subtext, only works because I can first and crucially translate the new meta discourse into my own, common discourse. Without that bridge, I would be eveloped by words with fuzzy referents whose definitions point back to still fuzzy referents, and then what? What have I actually learned by way of that rhetoric that I couldn't have learned through clear prose?
Right now, I'm making my way through Foucault's Discipline and Punish, and my god can it be it a slog. I wrote in a similar way when I had to hit the word count on a discussion post that I drafted 10 minutes before it was due, but I never made a whole school of thought out of that method lol.
Comment by soulful85 at 21/01/2025 at 03:14 UTC*
4 upvotes, 1 direct replies
Ha, been seriously preoccupied with the exact same thing the past few days as an ex academic from a discipline that rarely uses dense theory and as a patient of severe ME/CFS that has also fried my cognitive capacity.
Iam probably still a little ambivalent about the value of density, but not as much as you. I think so much theory is willfully and needlessly inaccessible, and I’ve thought that way before I got sick. The misfortune has been that I’m trying to deepen my knowledge in disciplines like critical theory, cultural studies, philosophy, psychoanalysis, etc.
One thing that has been helpful for me is that I have a good friend who is a philosopher and I read a paper of hers and another of another philosopher she recommended, and when I was struck by how easy it was for me to completely grasp most if not all the ideas presented, she explained to me the difference between analytic and continental philosophy. So the fact that an entire discipline, one that is the poster child of impenetrability, verbosity, etc has majorly split along such a line is interesting, and made me feel hopeful that if my illness improves, I can seek the depth my discipline lacks in that branch of philosophy. I’d bet they would have texts deducing the pitfalls and costs a of inaccessible knowledge
Lastly, while hopefully not intrusive on you, Id like to share that I am understanding my intellectual perseveration and preoccupation with this, in part, not in full as I believe this is a crucial timely conversation, as a psychic defense against the unbearable loss of the illness. What more devastating to me, you, us? As people who derived so much worth from their intellectual capacity to mow run across such brutal and physically brutalizing parameters and limits around how far we can allow our mind to go.
(And as a precovid ME/CFS person who got severe after covid, I’d really warn against cognitive exertion. I had significantly cut back my physical activity as I worsened but not my highly demanding cognitive work, & I deteriorated and crashed spectacularly.. so be really careful with cognitive PEM too ie the headaches)
On that note, I think disability is among the isms that I think has not been “reclaimed” as cool to theorise like gender & sexuality, and so I think we have to carry so much shame around us raising these questions that the various disciplines themselves disavow
Not what you asked for but Vivienne Mathies Boone, after her own affliction with several months of devastating long Covid now writes about it from a phenomenological and epistemic injustice lense I believe
Comment by 3corneredvoid at 21/01/2025 at 04:30 UTC
2 upvotes, 2 direct replies
Not a text, but here's my situated defence of opacity.
Clear language can make us think we have thought the same thoughts as our interlocutors or the writer of the text we're reading.
Often this perception is helpful but sometimes it's not.
One situation in which it can be less helpful is when language engages with the variation of thought and language themselves.
Another is when the object of language is very complex, and being clear would reduce language to a simplified account.
Another is when clear language produces harmful thought.
Sadly unclear language is sometimes used to make us think we have not, or cannot think the same thoughts as others. I think this happens much less often than we perceive it does, but that goes to show a little more that language is never really a clear window onto the thoughts of others.
Comment by Gloomy_Specific_9680 at 21/01/2025 at 02:49 UTC
1 upvotes, 1 direct replies
First of all, are you reading the texts in the original language? Second, which types of texts are you refering to? I know some that could help you, but it depends on what you are considering "Critical Theory"!
Comment by russetflannel at 21/01/2025 at 03:09 UTC
-2 upvotes, 1 direct replies
I don’t know if this is what you are looking for, but “Fashionable Nonsense” by Alan Sokal springs to mind. Also Philosophy & Literature’s Bad Writing Contest, famously won by Judith Butler. For critiques of pointlessly dense or opaque or pseudoscientific writing.
Comment by J4ck13_ at 21/01/2025 at 05:04 UTC
-1 upvotes, 0 direct replies
Here's a very short text arguing (mostly) against:
Iow I think that excluding people is a large part of the point, creating non-comprehending outsiders helps define and create a sense of belonging among the in-group. Also by making language less accessible its perceived value increases. This is because the reader or listener experiences a higher cost in terms of effort expended to achieve understanding. Since there's a psychological heuristic that higher costs are associated with greater rewards that understanding is therefore more highly valued than it otherwise would be. The higher effort needed also helps increase its exclusivity, further increasing its perceived value, at least to the initiated.
This isn't the whole story, obviously. As the ai notes jargon can efficiently communicate complex concepts. And there's no such thing as effortless communication. But I do think that lots of critical theory is unnecessarily dense and deliberately less accessible than needed.