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Originally Posted by Glice
For me, I always return to a certain point with this criticism - did anyone ever ask a dentist to not use technical terms? By which I mean - you can shout 'sophistry' at crit theory all you like, but ultimately, if a subject doesn't appeal to a broad audience, that's its audience's problem, not the subject.
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1. no matter how much jargon the dentist can spew, what matters is if he/she can fix your teeth or not, and no amount of sophistry can cover the results (pain, or its end). technical terms have their place, of course, in research, and technical papers, but they are not ends in themselves, except in humanities academic departments-- "let's talk obscurely and get tenure"
2. it IS the subject's problem, as the funding cuts demonstrate-- and i'm not saying appeal, i'm saying relevance. accounting is highly unappealing, yet very relevant. i detest neocon ideologues, but they have been relevant (unfortunately). marx has been relevant for over a century. plato and aristotle for a couple of millennia. lacan gave birth to a school of psychiatry that has you sitting there talking to yourself while the shrink watches in silence. a friend of mine went to one for 12 years. the first time the shrink opened her mouth was when the patient informed her she would no longer attend her sessions. the shrink said it was not a good idea. my friend told her to fuck off. 12 fucking years of talking to a wall-- fucking hilarious. i guess it makes for good absurdist comedy.
i'm not saying there's no room in the world for philosophy-- on the contrary, there should be more philosophy in everyday life, everyone should at least get a primer on the subject-- but whatever ideas of value are being produced these days get obscured by the tons of muck churned by worthless, clueless epigons-- parasytes who have actually taken over the system and taught their students to parrot little fragments of critical theory as if it was the highest dogma. truly pathetic, when you consider that the "critical" part is removed once the names of the grand ayatollahs are dropped-- oh, foucault said-- well you can't argue with that (especially because people don't read foucault, and the reason they don't is that they aren't provided the tools to actually comprehend it. so they parrot, to look clever, and get away with it)
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academics should write and publish a lot less. demonrail already explained why the system is so fucked up so i won't bother with it. i'd rather someone wait 20 years to write a good book than churn crap articles every trimester. the humanities need more
naturalists and less theorists. you know, someone who knows their subject like the back of their hand without having to come up with some bullcaca "theory" about it every time they open their mouth. my best literature teachers have been, of course, the writers-- they can't theorize for shit (and who cares?) but they know every little detail, the life and times of the authors and how the language comes together and who everyone was and you can sit in that classroom for 4 hours and you don't want it to ever end.
have you ever read auerbach's
mimesis? it's a fucking beautiful book, based on some silly premise (that the evolution of literature follows a hegelian dialectic)--- but what deliciousness-- the guy wrote it while in exile during world war 2. he was in turkey or egypt or somewhere, i forget. he had no specialized journals, no colleagues (he was a philologist), only his memory and obviously some access to books, and he wrote one of the loveliest treatises on literature ever written. and it's fucking crystal clear.
and you know why it's so good? because he fucking read what he was writing about. so even if he's wrong at times, or if you don't agree with his premise, he's relevant to people who love to read literature and want to understand better what the fuck is going on whey they read something.
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Originally Posted by Glice
if you can't see the general value of Lacan to contemporary metaphysics
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you can see it? then please explain it.