I don’t know how I missed this piece about “intellectual” gobbledygook, but this is a gem–even for Jonah Goldberg. There are so many money quotes here, I don’t know where to start:
Who’s Homi Bhabha? Where’ve you been, buddy? Homi’s one of the hottest “post-colonial theorists” in the world — which is not unlike saying “the best Octoberfest in Orlando.”
Or:
Denis Dutton, the editor who launched the bad writing contest (and who launched the incalculably valuable site Arts & Letters Daily), summed it up nicely: “To ask what this means is to miss the point. This sentence beats readers into submission and instructs them that they are in the presence of a great and deep mind. Actual communication has nothing to do with it.”
Or:
Today, the situation is reversed. Here in America — the very place the Homi Bhabhas and Judith Butlers denounce as “hegemonic” whatchamacallits and “enunciatory” thingamajigs — there are no totalitarian crimes. They do not exist. America is a lovely place. We are not “transferring populations” or anything of the sort.
In Orwell’s day, the fog of jargon was a smoke screen to conceal real horrors; today the jargon is just so much smoke, to hide the fact that there’s no fire. Read pretty much anything by Cornel West and you’ll find all sorts of euphemisms brimming with racial or anti-capitalist sound and fury, signifying nothing.
Or:
Today’s intellectual elite — the stars of Harvard and Berkeley — speak in such gibberish precisely because if they spoke plainly, clearing the smoke from their ideas, we’d learn that their views cover the spectrum from boringly unoriginal to sand-poundingly stupid.
A Few EduBlogs on Nonsense in Academics at matthewktabor.com says:
[…] Right Wing Nation, another favorite, points us to a National Review article about the prevalence of intellectual tripe in higher education. Jonah Goldberg hits the nail on the head and does so with refreshing, uncommon wit. If you want to read a few of Goldberg’s best quotes, check out RWN’s prime selections. Or you can check out the whole thing. Here’s an example of what you’ll find: The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power. […]
April 26, 2007, 12:59 am