[normac2]

> supposedly obscurantist, sophistic style of various disciplines of the liberal arts.

Would you say there is absolutely no kernel of truth to this? Check out, say, the abstract to this paper [1]. Is there nothing obscurantist about it? If you acknowledge that it's obscurantist to some degree, would you say that it's rare and I just cherry-picked a bad one?

I'm a STEM person, and I have trouble understanding why some people find this stuff to be just reasonable academic work with nothing dysfunctional, pedantic or sophistic about the writing style.

It just seems so extremely obvious to me, that it makes me wonder if the people into this stuff simply have nervous systems that are wired a bit differently, and I'm falling prey to the typical mind fallacy. It's hard to believe that if I studied this stuff deeply enough and with an open mind, it would no longer seem obscure.

[1] https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations/AAI3193887/

[voidhorse]

While one could argue that the abstract you linked is not well written, I do not think it’s obscurantist by any means. It’s a dissertation, so it’s not surprising they are using the jargon of the field and citing important works.

All academic literature is specialist literature. If you aren’t trained in the field you likely won’t understand it. It’s totally reasonable to me that a STEM person would have no idea what this abstract is saying just as a Humanities person probably couldn’t make heads or tails of the abstract of a dissertation on category theory or on a particular branch of computer science.

I find it funny that STEM folks always go after humanities academics for being obtuse when its just a matter of the pot calling the kettle black—dense STEM research and theory uses language that’d be considered equally obtuse to the untrained reader.

[normac2]

To me, it goes beyond being hard to read, and I take it as obscurantist in the strictest sense of someone going out of their way to be hard to understand.

I have a theory that most STEM people simply don't think like most humanities people, literally at a neurological level. (I edited my post to add some thoughts around that, possibly after you replied.)

STEM work rarely comes off that way to me. The only time it looks to me like the person is going out of their way to be obtuse and technical, is some higher math stuff (which is a known thing and acknowledged even by some mathematicians). This includes the stuff from entirely different parts of STEM that I don't understand at all.

[voidhorse]

That’s fair. I would agree there is a certain “big words == more intellectual == smarter” or “more difficult == smarter” fallacy that arises somewhat frequently in contemporary humanities papers.

I think part of it might originate from the fact that the abstractions used for talking about things in the humanities aren’t fixed as well as they are in science. Take the abstract in question for example—the writer uses the palimpsest as a sort of visual analogue and abstraction to try to describe interactions and relationships between texts/narratives—while it’s not an absurd metaphor, it’s difficult to grok, because there is no real standardized metaphor for describing this set of relationships. You could argue the object of study isn’t as well defined as it is in the sciences where we have fairly standardized abstractions like “waveform” etc. that make it a lost easier to talk about things clearly.

[chartpath]

I think that there is a thing called literary nonfiction which does use these higher level abstractions.

It might be that they are less fixed, as you say. That is a feature rather than a bug. It would take so much more text to describe everything literally than to use literary devices, which seem to be things that humans are really good at grasping. They are everywhere in film and TV but not everyone has experience naming them and referring to them in text at a meta level.

Imagine writing a symbolic AI in Go or C. There is a reason why people use Lisps and functional languages for very dense abstractions. They just do a lot of work, which some folks choose to deride as magic.

[beepbooptheory]

> It's hard to believe that if I studied this stuff deeply enough and with an open mind, it would no longer seem obscure.

Not sure you could satisfy the "open minded" part of that if you are coming from this close minded starting place!

Whenever I come across something I don't understand, I will try to figure it out. If it seems utterly weird, that's even more motivation to figure it out! I really can't imagine this mode of thought where you read something, do not immediately grasp it, and then feel that somehow it's wrong/bad/obscurantist. Like, how do you learn anything at all?

Side note but its funny people throw around "sophistic" in contexts like this. In Plato's time, sophists were precisely the ones to appeal to common intuitions, for money. It was Socrates who came along and said philosophy began with wonder, and demonstrated this by intentionally confusing people in order to break them out of modes of thought that were deeply embedded.

[normac2]

> Whenever I come across something I don't understand, I will try to figure it out. If it seems utterly weird, that's even more motivation to figure it out! I really can't imagine this mode of thought where you read something, do not immediately grasp it, and then feel that somehow it's wrong/bad/obscurantist. Like, how do you learn anything at all?

It's a matter of the tone, and also the fact that when I do read carefully and figure out what they're saying, I often think "wow, I could have put that in much simpler terms with no loss of information."

I don't feel this way about literally any other topic besides modern literary criticism (and stuff in that family like modern continental philosophy). Even analytic philosophy looking at similar topics doesn't normally feel willfully opaque in the same way, and I'm happy to dig in and learn the more difficult aspects of what they're saying.

Do you think this is due to being prejudiced about this exact area and nothing else?

[iworshipfaangs2]

> I often think "wow, I could have put that in much simpler terms with no loss of information."

Why not try? Seriously, that actually might be a good exercise in trying to cross into the "humanities brain" that you postulated.

In my other comment child comment in this thread, I also tried to revise it, and I think I showed that it wasn't very easy to do for me.

[denton-scratch]

It's intensely obscurantist. No, it's not rare; some people think that using language that's hard to understand makes you clever. I think true cleverness is explaining concepts that are hard to understand, using language that's easy to understand.

[iworshipfaangs2]

Why not respond to my long comment in this thread, where I defend this abstract? Your sentence---"It's intensely obscurantist"---is forceful-sounding but it has no argument.

I also cannot say whether this paper is deliberately obscure, because I am not a literature professor and I don't know who the audience is. But, I tried to give some arguments for why the abstract looks reasonable. Are you a literature professor?

[denton-scratch]

No, but I can read most scientific and philosophical texts in English, and get the gist. And I'm good enough at reading English to be able to recognise bafflegab when I see it.

If that prose is written in a code that is only meant to be comprehensible to sociologists and postmodernists, I don't see the sense in publishing it (as in, making it public).

[iworshipfaangs2]

>If that prose is written in a code that is only meant to be comprehensible to sociologists and postmodernists, I don't see the sense in publishing it (as in, making it public).

I mean, it was a doctoral dissertation, written exclusively for an audience of Literature PhDs[1]. Other times, these papers are published in specialized journals. Without publishing, how else would they disseminate their research?

And even if it's not for me, I'm always happy for open access to research. So I'm happy whenever postmodern thinkers make their work available to the public, in the same way I am when thinkers of abstract mathematics do. I personally will probably not be looking in either work, though :-).

[1] Cardoza-Kane, Karen M, "Trauma's palimpsests: The narrative cycles of Louise Erdrich and Richard Rodriguez" (2005). Doctoral Dissertations Available from Proquest. AAI3193887.

[iworshipfaangs2]

I'll try to answer. I absolutely don't think this look cherry-picked. In fact I think it looks like a reasonable humanities abstract! Note that I am far from a specialist in literature, but I do love to read.

First of all, although it uses some precise vocabulary, this abstract does not seem to have the particular blandness of much academic writing (I definitely agree that poor writing is often easy to find in all branches of academy). One little proxy to look at is the overuse of nominalization (i.e. using a noun form where a verb form could work). And not all nominalization is bad. The word "nominalization" is actually self-describing.

For example, perhaps we could "clean" this passage (my quote is a fragment of a participle phrase at the end of a sentence)

>... , their thematic and formal interconnections enacting both the repetitions of trauma and the necessary revisions of historiography, identity, and recovery.

into a new independent clause:

> They formally and thematically interconnect, repeating and necessarily revising how one presents history,self-identifies, and recovers.

But this "fix" might blur the original meaning in critical ways. For example, who now is this "one" being spoken of? That seemed to me to be the best option, over the worse pronouns "you" and "we" (which would be speaking for someone else). The original phrases avoid this entity identification, focusing instead on the general action.

I also removed enact, but what if these texts really do "enact" a revision? This "creation upon creation" of the an action seems in-line with the concept of a palimpsest, which is a repurposed book (I'll speak more on the palimpsest after I dissect my awful revision). Then, I completely butchered the last concepts. To present history is only one aspect of the general practice of historiography. Revising an identity is not the same as self-identifying (and, again, who is this self?). To recover matches with the action of recovery more closely, but using the verb would destroy the sentence's parallelism. Hopefully, this example demonstrates the great difficulty of using precise language with heavy, complex concepts.

On to the subject itself, using the word "palimpsest" doesn't seem obscure. Perhaps the author's central thesis is that the works that she studies have repurposed old texts or old memories of trauma again and again. This seems like a suitable metaphor. Or, maybe palimpsest has a special technical meaning in her body of scholarship.

And the abstract does carefully lay out the scholarly tradition that the paper follows, going chapter by chapter. Readers familiar with the works she mentions will probably be happy for this guided summary. Readers not familiar, like me for almost all the names, may not even be part of the intended audience.

Lastly it seems like she uses two different authors to explore her own scholarly interests in trauma, gender, sexuality, and self. These seem like great things to study, and very complex indeed. Even if these themes were not on the minds of the authors who are the subject of this paper, these authors nevertheless do live in the world, and their work necessarily incorporates fragments of inherited thought (like how you and I speak English, whose development we had nothing to do with). Maybe this paper finds some unexpected connections.

> that it makes me wonder if the people into this stuff simply have nervous systems that are wired a bit differently

I don't know anything about nervous systems.

But in these kind of works, there are not any exact answers. You cannot say `gcc gender-paper.c` and find out if it compiles. Instead, these ideas have to be written about and discussed against a wider body of thought. And there's probably some element of judgement and metaphor required to think this way. And the ideas in these works in fact do slowly disseminate and affect society.

That's my spiel. I typed it up because I see these kind of comments often, and I wanted to put a good response on record.

----

I also don't believe there is zero obscurantism in the humanities, by the way. Shitty research happens everywhere. But, every time the humanities gets slammed as being particularly soft, it seems like the reader forgets all the articles on the front page about falsified scientific results, unreproducible research, political machinations to get tenure, outright grift, etc.