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created by [deleted] on 21/01/2025 at 02:44 UTC
31 upvotes, 20 top-level comments (showing 20)
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Comment by Doc_Boons at 21/01/2025 at 02:53 UTC
26 upvotes, 3 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 DeathlyFiend at 21/01/2025 at 03:33 UTC
12 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 okdoomerdance at 21/01/2025 at 03:48 UTC
9 upvotes, 0 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 lobsterterrine at 21/01/2025 at 15:50 UTC
7 upvotes, 0 direct replies
Paraphrasing my dad (philosophy PhD who wrote his diss about Hegel, so knows from some opacity) here. I was chatting with him once about how to introduce undergrad students to hard texts, and he said that for some philosophical writers, the experience of untangling the difficult text is as important as whatever propositions the text contains. There are some authors (he mentioned Nietzche, and maybe Hume?) who write that way intentionally, such that as you work your way through it you see that they've already anticipated your first three layers of reaction and all of the associated affects - frustration, exhasperation, revelation, pleasure? The journey is as important as the destination, in other words.
I am absolutely certain I've read something in the disability studies neighborhood about this but I cannot for the life of me remember what it was. I'll meditate on it and pop back in if I think of it.
I'm also in the final stages of writing a critical diss about complex chronic illnesses including ME/CFS so I'm gonna be reading this thread all day.
Comment by Liquid_Librarian at 21/01/2025 at 04:17 UTC
4 upvotes, 1 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 Realistic-Plum5904 at 21/01/2025 at 14:18 UTC
5 upvotes, 0 direct replies
A few texts from my field, rhetoric and writing studies, may be interesting and relevant: Daniel L. Smith's [1] "Ethics and 'Bad Writing': Dialectics, Reading, and Affective Pedagogy," which was part of a cluster of articles on "difficult writing" in JAC 23.3 (2003) ; [2] "The Costs of Clarity" by Alba Newmann Holmes and Kara Wittman. After running a Google Scholar citation-tracking search, I also stumbled on this recent text (which I haven't personally read but which seems relevant): "In defense of obscure academic writing" by Sean Braune.
Comment by GA-Scoli at 21/01/2025 at 14:38 UTC*
4 upvotes, 0 direct replies
Coming at your question from a more Bakhtinian literary criticism side, what is a given text even for? What's the point of it? How does the text get reproduced and contextualized? Who reads it and why?
In an academic/pedagogical context, a text is something that contains knowledge that a given reader/student needs to be able to consume and then reproduce adequately for it to "count" (reproducing can mean literally passing the text on, or just incorporating the text into the image of your self as something you successfully read and understood). Purposeful opacity in this context has several potential uses, here are just three of them:
Opacity can signal to the reader that this text contains greater than average knowledge density: that it's hard, but it's worth the work, because once you've read it, you'll have passed a test. It will count higher. It attempts to trigger our innate pleasure in giving ourselves tests and passing them, a mental runner's high (of course, each text like this privileges a specific mental route to run and win the race). The sadist/masochist dynamic is a feature, not a bug.
Opacity can be a style that signals the belonging of the text to some sort of guarded tradition. Branding, in other words. More charitably, the opaque style contains a kind of poetry, the rhetoric of the *way* that the knowledge is framed, and people are drawn to that poetics. Derrida has a pronounced style; if you lean toward Derrida, you look for that style in others. Even if you don't like it, you may look for it because it *feels* important because you already associate the style with the tradition it invokes.
Opacity can also be a politicized statement against the very way that knowledge is meant to be consumed and then reproduced for money under capitalism, and a demand that the text be read in different, more organic ways (literary criticism usually takes this "don't study me academically" as a challenge and studies the hell out of it anyway).
Comment by No_Key2179 at 22/01/2025 at 00:10 UTC
3 upvotes, 0 direct replies
I remember recently reading something in Guy Hocquenghem's *Homosexual Desire* about how the theorists following in Freud's footsteps like Lacan decided to be way more abstruse because they felt that Freud's plain language meant that he was much more vulnerable to misuse and soundbites. They wanted to stop people from going into their books, finding a random quote here or there, and pulling it out to defend this or that hypothesis without actually understanding the meaning of the quote in the context of the work as a whole. So the idea was to make their stuff incomprehensible to a lay reader and make someone have to learn the lingo first by immersing themselves in the work.
Comment by loserboy42069 at 21/01/2025 at 07:47 UTC
7 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 [deleted] at 21/01/2025 at 03:14 UTC*
6 upvotes, 0 direct replies
[deleted]
Comment by RyanSmallwood at 21/01/2025 at 14:18 UTC*
2 upvotes, 0 direct replies
I have thought about this a lot as someone who likes to reads philosophy out of casual interest and for its usefulness. One aspect I run into a lot is that often difficult philosophers have easier texts, and if you ask someone who knows all their works they can often tell you which ones are most helpful to start with. But when people ask about getting into certain philosophers as often happens on the /r/askphilosophy subreddit I notice they come in with a lot of preconceived notions that make it more difficult to get into complex thinkers. Often people come in wanting to read their most famous text, which is often their most difficult and aimed at a specific audience of specialists. There's also an idea that reading other famous canonical texts gives you the context for later ones, when historical scholarship pointing out actual influences often shows a more complex network of local influences in addition to more famous past texts.
I think the pedagogical value of texts is something that's often not discussed enough. If you talk to people who've read a lot they often have pedagogical suggestions and sometimes you find it mentioned in passing in the literature. But when getting into a difficult philosopher there's not any obviously available information on the best way to start unless you know the right places to ask.
I think there can also be an overemphasis on texts making novel ideas over texts presenting ideas in better ways. This might be more of an issue for difficult historical thinkers, but as I read more specialist histories of philosophy I find there's lots of interesting texts influenced by major thinkers that present and apply their ideas in different ways, but there's very little interest in these texts outside of historical research. But for these thinkers I wonder if some of these would be better ways for people to learn about their ideas if there was less emphasis on who first wrote about the idea.
I'll also note that difficult thinkers often give explanations for their difficulty and the reasons are not the same between them. Kant in his preface to the critique of pure reason gives this explanation:
Finally, as regards clarity the reader has a right to demand first discursive (logical) clarity, through concepts, but then also intuitive (aesthetic) clarity, through intuitions, that is, through examples or other illustrations in concreto. I have taken sufficient care for the former. That was essential to my undertaking but was also the contingent cause of the fact that I could not satisfy the second demand, which is less strict but still fair. In the progress of my labor I have been almost constantly undecided how to deal with this matter. Examples and illustrations always appeared necessary to me, and hence actually appeared in their proper place in my first draft. But then I looked at the size of my task and the many objects with which I would have to do, and I became aware that this alone, treated in a dry, merely scholastic manner, would suffice to fill an extensive work; thus I found it inadvisable to swell it further with examples and illustrations, which are necessary only for a popular aim, especially since this work could never be made suitable for popular use, and real experts in this science do not have so much need for things to be made easy for them; although this would always be agreeable, here it could also have brought with it something counter-productive. The Abbé Terrasson says that if the size of a book is measured not by the number of pages but by the time needed to understand it, then it can be said of many a book that it would be much shorter if it were not so short. But on the other hand, if we direct our view toward the intelligibility of a whole of speculative cognition that is wide-ranging and yet is connected in principle we could with equal right say that many a book would have been much clearer if it had not been made quite so clear. For the aids to clarity help in the parts but often confuse in the whole, since the reader cannot quickly enough attain a survey of the whole; and all their bright colors paint over and make unrecognizable the articulation or structure of the system, which yet matters most when it comes to judging its unity and soundness.
So it seems Kant is acknowledging his work is more aimed at specialists, and that the initial difficulty of using less examples will make it easier for them to grasp overall structure of his work.
Hegel, usually known for being difficult, is critical of earlier philosophers like Kant using lots of Latin terminology in their explanations and he aims to use German terms that would be more familiar to his audience, though sometimes these terms can become quite unintuitve and technical for contemporary readers using English translations. He has other explanations for why the kind of thought required by his more abstract texts will be difficult, but he thought it could be prepared for and his lectures which were transcribed by his students were quite popular and often give more context and examples than his more academic writings.
And I'm less familiar with Heidegger's philosophy but I believe one reason for his difficulty is that he thinks a lot of common language has unthought assumptions behind it that limits our thinking, so his aim get us away from terms that have become too familiar to examine these assumptions. And I believe I've come across other reasons from other thinkers, but I forget some specifics
Since someone else mentioned Analytic and Continental philosophy, I'll just throw out a word of caution that a lot of different kinds of philosophy fall under these labels and its difficult to generalize them. Certain strands of Analytic philosophy have aimed at clarity, Ordinary Language Philosophy is a good example and its sometimes associated with the philosophy of Late Wittgenstein. But I've heard Analytic philosophers say that certain areas of Analytic Philosophy can be quite illegible to someone without the appropriate background. "Continental Philosophy" is also a term that gets applied to a lot of different philosophical schools that didn't necessarily see themselves as part of the same project initially. While some people now think of themselves as "Continental Philosophers" influenced by these schools of thought I'd be cautious about assuming everyone thrown under this label now had a similar approach or difficult style.
Anyways, these are just some ideas or routes to explore. Its something I'm very interested in and would love to see discussed more.
Comment by Able-Wedding8929 at 22/01/2025 at 02:18 UTC
2 upvotes, 0 direct replies
Fashion System by Roland Barthes might be something you’d enjoy
Comment by 3corneredvoid at 21/01/2025 at 04:30 UTC
4 upvotes, 1 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 [deleted] at 21/01/2025 at 02:49 UTC
1 upvotes, 1 direct replies
[deleted]
Comment by Cathexis_Rex at 21/01/2025 at 22:39 UTC*
1 upvotes, 1 direct replies
Check out the contemporary Art World and its critics. 'International Art English' is a much discussed topic in that space and there's some killer polemics about just how bludgeoningly repressive it is: how it's used to coerce aspiring cultural producers into large student loans and relegate them to the urban debtor class, whilst guiding them into a supposedly left-leaning labor market that offers zero worker protections. It all feels very esoteric and rather trivial until you get to the higher levels of business and see how it operates as a think tank to workshop the public political personas of the massively wealthy. IAE is the apotheosis of maze-like sentence formatting used as a marketing tactic for the benefit of the author and their allies, rather than the consumer. How much of the whole ecosystem is a conspiracy vs. a phenomena is under constant debate.
Contemporary Avante-Garde artists in general are a *lot* like critical theorists, only specializing in other mediums: intellectually omnivorous and seeking an alternative to the norms of their time. The often artisanal nature of their work, how it is economically positioned, and the way this work is explicitly co-opted by an elite literati for its own aesthetic/economic project (that of increasing the market value of blue chip collectors' investments and/or position themselves as thought leaders within a particular cultural matrix), makes them patient zeros when it comes to terminal sophistry. They're also force-fed dense critical texts in their academic training and a lot of them *resent the hell* out of it, so they've got some pretty interesting stuff to say on the matter.
One place to start in that world is the video essays of Brad Troemel[1]. He makes densely-layered video pieces in which he dissects contemporary cultural trends. Patreon constitutes a paywall, but for 5 bucks you can watch everything he's done lately and then dip out if it isn't for you. He cites other readings in his notes, so it could form the hub of one wheel on your journey. Troemel isn't for everyone, but I can attest to him being an authentic product of his environment. I went through the same conditioning program and got a similarly crazy gleam in my eyes as a result. And he's current, speaking to stuff that's gone on the last two decades.
1: https://www.patreon.com/c/bst/posts
Wittgenstein is a brutal read for some, but just brushing up against his premise of the 'language game' and engaging with that on a first-person level (as in, "I'm a speaker, I play language games. Why do I play them the way I do?") can help to ground the concept of the *practical* function of opaque language and offer context as to why an agent - be it a lone-wolf author or institutional representative - would find utility in using it. How a speaker constructs a sentence is similar to how one dresses: whether one does it subconsciously or with no self-awareness, the choices made broadcasts to the audience how the speaker would like to be perceived, and is based on a whole slew of assumptions.
Look at the marketing sector and political campaigns: specifically the freelancers hired on to get politicians elected to upper level positions of power. These people are *geniuses* of communication, and they have the feedback mechanisms to back up their theories (customer spending and voter turnout - both a leveraging of personal capital). Some of the speeches these guys give at places like Columbia University are shockingly transparent. They just lay it all out: how to use language instrumentally to manipulate others and slam that epistemic box inside the mind of a person shut once you've gotten them to agree with you. Some of the most cogent critiques against the use of dense language comes from these spaces. It's also interesting listening in on lectures where the subcultural understanding is that anyone speaking lies at least 35% of the time. Maybe Start With Arthur Finkelstein - that dude is a trip.
Final suggestion: the author Italo Calvino. He shows another path through the literary cognitive project: one not so interested in hammering out new linguistic widgets as using the ones we have in approachable, yet graceful ways. He's an overtly structural writer while still being incredibly breezy, and reading some of his better-known works can develop in the reader an intuition for the *shapes* of written arguments, minus all the definitional clutter - the charming and yet underhanded ways in which they become tautologies when you get right down to it. Also funny. Good at blowing the stink off.
Comment by lathemason at 24/01/2025 at 19:25 UTC
1 upvotes, 0 direct replies
Here's a cluster of short pieces on academic writing[1], made available by the Chronicle of Higher Education back in 2014. The Pinker piece amounts to some fairly conservative humanities-bashing and calling out density for its own sake; but there are lessons to be had about clarity too.
1: https://grad.ncsu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/Why-Academics-Stink-at-Writing-1-2.pdf
Comment by Asatru55 at 09/02/2025 at 20:39 UTC
1 upvotes, 1 direct replies
I see that criticism a lot and I'll admit I get a bit peeved and defensive every time. I get where this criticism is coming from and many academics definitely use language in a self-referential and obfuscating way for self-marketing reasons.
But at the same time, I ask myself 'Does anyone ask physicists not to use complicated math because the layperson doesn't understand it?' Of course not, it seems like the 'hard sciences' get to have an aura of arcane mystique when their material is dense. So why does humanities have to be held up to the standard of being accessible when the academic standard of any science is and should be rigor - not being a nice piece of literature for a consumer market?
Then again, why do I get defensive? At least when I wrote academic papers, I felt like I had to invest even more time and effort into editing my texts that I have already exhausted on constructing the concepts and going through the endless loops of academic peer-review only to have even more felt stress on my shoulders by being held to the standard of editing the text for accessibility and simplicity. Because texts could always be better written and more accessible, of course. There's always room for improvement.
But there's probably your answer, which many academics likely wouldn't want to touch upon due to the reasons outlined above. Many likely feel they'd cut their own flesh by criticizing standards of writing styles in academia, meaning they'd have to increase their own standards. academia of humanities is already very stressful and not very financially rewarding.
In the end, there is an obvious answer that many get equally defensive about - which is to ditch the old format of the 'paper' altogether and instead embrace multimodal forms of writing and also automated translation / re-writing through AI technology.
Accessibility is a question of multimodality - to convey the same piece of information over multiple channels, languages, styles etc. for the reader to 'decode' the content according to their own physical and mental configurations.
The writer also has their own physical and mental configuration with which they write. The process of translation is laborious. But it can be automated.
Comment by Smol_Sick_Bean at 21/01/2025 at 04:13 UTC*
1 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 [deleted] at 21/01/2025 at 03:09 UTC*
-2 upvotes, 1 direct replies
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Comment by [deleted] at 21/01/2025 at 05:04 UTC
-1 upvotes, 1 direct replies
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