Fishy Requisites
Oh good, another one. Another nice barrel full of docile, torpid fish.
Why is it that every article bashing “theory” comes from someone who doesn’t know what they are talking about?
Hmm. Why is it that the defenders of ‘theory’ (at least on this site at this time) can’t do better? One, does every article ‘bashing’ (that is to say, criticising) ‘theory’ come from someone who knows nothing of the subject? As a matter of fact, no. I’ve read several articles and indeed books by people who know a lot about it, including some by people who were once keen on ‘theory’ themselves. There is William Kerrigan’s essay in Wild Orchids and Trotsky, for example. And two, why is it that the defenders of ‘theory’ who presumably pride themselves on their awareness of how rhetoric works, on the ways people use language to manipulate each other (I don’t really know what else literary ‘theorists’ would pride themselves on) allow themselves to use such blunt instruments? Like making sweeping statements that are obviously not true, and using the word ‘bashing’ for heaven’s sake, which is such an obvious pejorative that it’s one of the first words we put in the Dictionary. Suggestion for would-be defenders of the brilliance of ‘theory’: be cautious about using the word ‘every’.
There are many theorists who are/were excellent writers — think of Blanchot, for example, or Barthes, or Simone Weil. Just because Lacan wasn’t E.B. White doesn’t mean that what Lacan writes is automatically wrong.
Well no kidding. But who said anything else? The title of the In Focus article is Bad Writing, not Theory. I’m not talking about Lacan or Derrida or Foucault, I’m talkng about their inept imitators. And how did Simone Weil get into the picture? Since when is Simone Weil a ‘theorist’? Do ‘theorists’ get to claim everybody whose work they admire as a fellow ‘theorist’ and then brandish their trophies as evidence that theory is great stuff? If so, just exactly what is ‘theory’ anyway and how does it differ from philosophy? And again, the subject of this particular article is bad writing, not error. It’s perfectly true that a bad writer can still be right (and nor am I suggesting E.B. White as a model, in any case), but if the writing is bad, the rightness will be that much less convincing. And if the writing is deliberately bad, bad for the sake of impressing other fans of bad writing rather than good for the sake of making new fans of good writing and thinking, then my claim is that that’s a bad state of affairs.
Objecting to critical theory on stylistic grounds allows people to dismiss it without actually reading it — and this is the very kernel of ignorance.
Does it? Aren’t people allowed to dismiss it without reading it anyway? They don’t need my permission. And why is it ignorance, indeed the very kernel of ignorance, not to have read critical theory? Is it more ignorant to have given critical theory the go-by for the sake of reading, say, history and sociology and philosophy and economics than it would be to have read critical theory but not history, sociology and the rest? If so, why? And then, there are problems with consequentialist arguments anyway. It’s not necessarily a great idea to claim that one shouldn’t criticise X because that allows people to ‘dismiss’ X – at that rate no one could ever criticise anything, and surely the problems with that idea are obvious enough. And it’s not particularly clear why objecting to critical theory on stylistic grounds would allow people to dismiss it, in any case.
What’s interesting to me is that is we substitute “philosophy” for “theory,” suddenly it’s acceptable to be turgid and dense with respect to your prose. On the unfortunate day when similar articles appear attacking the late Donald Davidson’s brilliant but daunting essays on cognition, we will know the playing field is finally level.
And what’s interesting to me is the way people will keep giving themselves away. There we have it yet again – the attempt to associate ‘theory’ with philosophy or physics or science in general. Let’s try a different thought-experiment – let’s substitute ‘philosophy’ for, say, Scientology, or Objectivism, or Jungian psychology. And thus we see that having a turgid, dense style is no guarantee of having well-founded ideas any more than having a lucid one is a guarantee of having either well-founded or ill-founded ones. Or to put it another way, it’s not particularly acceptable for philosophy to be turgid and dense if it can avoid it, just as it’s not in science writing. And just as guilt by association is not considered a good argument, neither is innocence by association. ‘Theory’ has to defend itself on its own ground; just mentioning Donald Davidson isn’t going to do it.
Sorry to keep posting examples of prose but I think it is illustrative,
here’s a bit from one of my favourite papers in philosophy of mind (http://www.u.arizona.edu/~chalmers/papers/qualia.html):
“We can even extend the reasoning straightforwardly to the case of an appropriately-organized population: we simply need to imagine neurons replaced one-by-one with tiny homunculi, ending up with a network of homunculi that is essentially equivalent to the population controlling a robot. (If one objects to tiny homunculi, they can be external and of normal size, as long as they are equipped with appropriate radio connections to the body when necessary.) Precisely the same considerations about intermediate cases arise. One can also imagine going from a multiple-homunculi case to a single-homunculus case, yielding something like Searle’s “Chinese room” example. We need only suppose that the homunculi gradually “double up” on their tasks, leaving written records of the state of each component, until only a single homunculus does all the work. If the causal organization of the original system is preserved, even if it is only among a system of marks on paper, then the same arguments suggest that the system will have experiences. (Of course, we should not expect the homunculus itself to have the experiences; it is merely acting as a sort of causal facilitator.)”
Seems pretty straight forward language to me, bizarre subject matter if you’re not familiar with the field but perfectly clear. In general I think the problem philosophers have is labouring a point rather than extreme obtuseness – what is illustrating is that even the philosophers, who also talk about everyday concepts and language on an analytical level, seem to write more clearly than the scare quote littered literary theory I quoted before (which was still quite understandable). Most of this literary theory, postmodernist discourse and the rest seems to invite obscurity…I wonder why.
Some more semi-randomly selected quotes from the philosophy of mind:
“However that may be, we are still faced with the space problem for consciousness. How might it be dealt with? There are, historically, two main lines of response to the problem, commonly supposed to be exclusive and exhaustive. One response denies a key premise of the problem, namely that mind sprang from matter. Instead, mind has an autonomous existence, as independent of matter as matter is of mind. Perhaps mind has always existed, or maybe came about in some analogue of the origin of matter, or owes its existence to a direct act of God. In any event, mind is no kind of out-growth of matter but an independent ontological category. Thus we have classical dualism, Descartes’ own position. In effect, dualism takes the space problem to be a reductio of the emergence hypothesis. Mind and matter may causally interact (let us not inquire how!) but it is absurd, for dualism, to suppose that mind could owe its very being to matter. That is simply metaphysically impossible, according to dualism. You can no more derive the unextended from the extended than you can derive an ought from an is.”
“Experience itself however, does not seem to fit the pattern. The idea of moving from appearance to reality seems to make no sense here. What is the analogue in this case to pursuing a more objective understanding of the same phenomena by abandoning the initial subjective viewpoint toward them in favour of another that is more objective but concerns the same thing? Certainly it appears unlikely that we will get closer to the real nature of human experience by leaving behind the particularity of our human point of view and striving for a description in terms accessible to beings that could not imagine what it was like to be us. If the subjective character of experience is fully comprehensible only from one point of view, then any shift to greater objectivity—that is, less attachment to a specific viewpoint—does not take us nearer to the real nature of the phenomenon: it takes us farther away from it.”
“What connects the mind to the world? This problem has always caused conflicts between physics, psychology, and religion. In the world of Newton’s mechanical laws, every event was entirely caused by what had happened earlier. There was simply no room for anything else. Yet common sense psychology said that events in the world were affected by minds: people could decide what occurred by using their freedom of will. Most religions concurred in this, although some preferred to believe in schemes involving divine predestination. Most theories in psychology were designed to support deterministic schemes, but those theories were usually too weak to explain enough of what happens in brains. In any case, neither physical nor psychological determinism left a place for the freedom of will.”
[Chalmers, McGinn, Nagel, Minsky]
Nice quote.
Chalmers’ website also includes some great links to philosophical humor!
http://www.u.arizona.edu/~chalmers/phil-humor.html
I’ve read some McGinn and Nagel and I certainly find both of them readable. And then, it’s also possible that some subjects really are difficult or impossible to write about clearly – it’s just that in the case of ‘theory’ that is so very often not the case. The difficulty is artificial and self-imposed, not inherent in the subject.
I’ll have to check out the Chalmers site and maybe add it to our Links.
You mean anyone ever actually made sense out of Lacan?
The reason I can’t tell whether he is right or wrong is because the one book of his I picked up was word-salad. Getting a “…For Beginners” guide [not to be confused with For Dummies, they haven’t done Lacan] was no help, all they gave me was hot air about body parts not discussed in polite society and an unhealthy-sounding emphasis on the most helpless parts of our lives. It was as if after cutting away all the fat, one found that there wasn’t any meat.
I don’t know if this is too off-topic to fit in, but I get kind of steamed when I hear people treat Lacan like he is such a genius. If there is a book of his that DOES make sense, where is it?