Sandefur has an interesting post at Positive Liberty about what he calls hyperlexicophilia, the tendency of some, particularly political philosophers, to use language to appear to say something meaningful when, in reality, they've said nothing at all. He links to the absolutely brilliant postmodern essay generator (I still want a version of this that would generate your standard conservative essay, full of all the empty catchphrases - family values, judicial tyranny. the moral fabric of America, etc - that pretend to say much and say nothing at all) as an example of how such vacuous essays can be formed, literally, out of thin air. This is precisely the sort of pseudo-scholarly nonsense that so perfectly trapped the hyper-educated fools from Social Text in the Sokal hoax (if you don't know what that is, please follow the link and read up on it - it's an absolutely wonderful example of the complete vacuity of the postmodern left).
But Sandefur is specifically talking about an essay in a book he just finished reading, an essay about Teddy Roosevelt and the need for "manliness". And this essay demonstrates that those on the right can peddle eloquent-sounded crap just as energetically as the left. The quotes and conclusions he draws from them are perfect:
I am not saying that Morrisey is wrong in this essay. He is neither wrong nor right, because he says nothing whatsoever. His essay is devoid of content, featuring in its place a veneer of fancy terms and quotations from Teddy, all suspended thinly over a crevasse. It has no thesis, no theme, and no conclusion. It is made up of sentences that, like houseflies, take off, buzz around in graceful and elegant curlicues, and then land in precisely the same spot. He is simply awestruck by his own gaudy pomposity.For example: "To govern themselves, American liberals need to recall the manly, and womanly, thumotic virtues of their forebears, including the great-souled men of the ancient world before liberalism" (40). Thumotic, for those of you below the salt, refers to the strength of character needed to fight for one's values (from the Greek thumos, meaning assertiveness or the ability to get riled up). An impressive word, that; but the banality of Morrisey's point becomes clear when we cull the obscurities and redundancies: to govern themselves, people must be self-assertive. That is not a profound insight, and dressing it up doesn't make it any better.
Quite so. This sort of misuse of language always reminds me of art criticism, much of which is little more than cute phrases pressed together to no sound end. I recall reading one art critic, speaking of a piece of modern art, saying that it has "a certain deceptive sincerity". Uh, yeah. This is the verbal equivalent of pixie sticks or bubblegum - it tastes good on the tongue momentarily, but it has no substance at all.
This is the second time this week I've been reminded of how language can be used to obscure rather than to enlighten. The first was in my exchange with Paul Nelson, with the entire notion of "intelligence as a causal primitive" is a perfect example of a phrase that sounds like it means a great deal, but in reality means nothing. And you know who may the single worst purveyor of meaningful-sounding gibberish? Cornel West. If you've ever seen him interviewed, you know exactly what I'm talking about. He sounds like someone trying very, very hard to sound educated.
- Log in to post comments
Why are comments closed there?
Anyway, Sandefur's posts is not much substantive itself, I'm afraid, though I have not read the essay he has read.
The best analysis of Teddy Roosevelt is by Stephen Ducat in "The Wimp Factor". The whole chapter is on Teddy and it is quite meaningful, especially within the broader context of the thesis of the whole book.
A long time favorite example of that review language nonsense which has become a years-old running joke with a friend, was the phrase 'delicately paced', which we saw in reference to some art film.
Years later, he'll see The Transporter, or something, and tell me, "Mmmm, that pacing is so delicate"
I think it is designed to make an ordinary person like me, think they speak the truth, especially when they name drop known philosophers. Even if I doubt their logic how can I be sure. I have heard of those other people, maybe read them many years ago. I don't want to invest time in analyzing what they are trying to say. So basically their message gets ignored.
I confess, I don't quite understand your tendency to attack postmodernism, and especially not this attribution of empty, convoluted language to postmodernists. Wasn't Orwell complaining about the same thing before postmodernism even existed?
Of course, I may be misrepresenting and/or misunderstanding your position, in which case I apologize.
Skemono wrote:
Have you ever read the Sokal hoax paper? That will illustrate perfectly what I mean. The problem is that postmodernism is self-defeating. It begins with the premise that there is no objective truth, only perspectives from various positions of power. But if there is no objective truth or reality, then there is no reason to argue that their position is true - yet they do.
I wish to challenge the implication that the phrase "postmodernist left" creates.
Many on the left are not postmodernists - indeed, I would go so far as to say they are an uninfluential minority. Loud, perhaps, but as they do indeed say little, there's little they can affect.
The phrase seems designed to attack "leftism" by conflating it with postmodernism - I am reminded of "ivory-tower liberal", among other things.
Of course not everyone on the left is a postmodernist; that's why I specifically said "postmodern left", to distinguish between the postmodern left and the non-postmodern left. There are also postmoderns on the right, but they're more rare I think.
Postmoderns on the right? We call them creationists.
Alas, no; although I did read plenty of excerpts of actual postmodernist works when I took a course on them in college (and I'll readily testify to the convolution of their writings). I was probably just being overly sensitive, but I came away with the impression that you only meant postmodernists wrote that way.
I don't really think that's a fair summation of their position, any more than when a fundamentalist decries "Darwinists" or the like for believing there's no objective truth because they don't believe in God. I'm sure that if you asked a postmodernist what the "objective" sum of two and two is, you'd get four every time. I believe that they'd say that there are objective, scientific truths; but not societal or moral ones--just as examples.
Lacan (who of course predates postmodernism, but he did influence the movement) believed in an objective reality (the Real) but believed that we simply couldn't access it because of language. And Baudrillard, if I'm not mistaken, took a similar stance, saying that we couldn't access the real because of ingrained cultural biases.
He must have lived his life surrounded by creationists.
Oh this was wonderful and the examples in comments are also great. I hate pretentious tautological language. One of my favorite essays about the basic emptiness of a philosophy or school's (mis)use of language was Chomsky's sixties attack on Skinner's behaviorism. It's a very readable essay basically showing how Skinner said, at best, tautologies, and at worse, things that made no discernible sense, but it sounded good and people bought into it.
I have also read art criticisms and some movie criticisms that led me to think that the sole point of the author writing them was to make the rest of us feel stupid and less educated than them, as they seemed to use very difficult words that as far as I could tell said practically nothing. "Delicately paced" is a very cute example of this. I also refer you to lots of wine critics.
Ah yes, wine critics... "A naive domestic Burgundy with no particular breeding, but I'm sure be amused by its presumption." (From a cartoon by James Thurber)
Following on to Skemono's comment, it seems to me that the postmodernist stuff about "no societal or moral truths" and "ingrained cultural biases" has been hijacked by cynical hucksters and propagandists to justify two things: refusal to research adequately a situation on which they are commenting; and a willingness to disregard basic rules of morality and ethics (those pesky subjective "ingrained cultural biases").
Skemono -
Where a lot of postmodernist thought seems to stumble (at least in my interpretation of it - which is just as valid as any other anyway, irregardless of what the original writers may have been trying to communicate :P) is that it treats individual interpretations of language as qualia. Hence, they essentially apply Locke's spectrum inversion problem to everything, but it's no longer a question of whether there is an objective concept of blue, it becomes a question of whether there is an objective concept of "objective", "concept", "of", and "blue". Typically, when we write, we write as if words do have objective meanings, but a postmodernist conciously rejects that assumption. Being that the assumption isn't accurate, this leads to improved clarity when analyzing language, but undermines the ablility to communcate, since he's trying to communicate a quale, since the traditional means of reducing language to something objective is objectively meaningful words. Since they're trying to communicate an objective truth, but are conciously aware that their communication lacks objective meaning, postmodern writers tend to seem like they suffer from some sort of jargon aphasia.
One way to make sense of it all is to take an ax to the concept of qualia, as Dennett does (see Quining Qualia). Once you get rid of the idea of that linguistic interpretations are unique and irreducible, you can use empirical methods to find objective meaning in language without assigning objective meaning to words.
...you can use empirical methods to find objective meaning in language without assigning objective meaning to words.
Sorry, Matt, you lost me there. A language is made up of words (as well as rules for how to organize them); so how can you "find objective meaning" in a language, if objective meanings have not been assigned, and agreed on, to the words in said language?
I do like your reference to "jargon aphasia" though -- spot-on, from what I've seen of the PoMo corwd.
Raging Bee -
Imagine you wanted to communicate with someone who you had absolutely no linguistic common ground with, but you knew to have a language. You'd probably approach it by showing them objects or actions and seeing what their verbal reaction is and looking for correlations. In this case, you're approaching language empirically by looking for correlations between two objectively observable phenomenon - what you show the person and their resulting verbalizations. You look for correlations in the responses to build a model of the language in your mind, which is where the rules of grammar, definitions, etc, reside. These models aren't necessarily going to be the same, and can be quite different between individuals even within the same culture, paticularly with regards to the nuances of definitions.
Postmodern thought realizes that and asks how we can ever communicate truth via language when we each have our own definitions? Hence the excessive neologisms - it frees you from the baggage of your experiences and allows you to construct an abstract definition. This works fine in your own mind, but once you start a dialog, other people start using the word and you lose control of its definition. Once injected into dialog, these words are even weaker than longer standing ones since they are defined by fewer examples. So you get lots of writing that makes perfect sense to the author, but is gibberish to others.
The leap that needs to be made to return the empirical is to frame words not as having definitions, but rather as consisting of the set of observed usages, and that definitions are models we use to make predictions about usage. Thus, empirical investigation of usage allows objective conclusions to be made about language without actually needing to generate objective definitions for words.
Postmodern thought realizes that and asks how we can ever communicate truth via language when we each have our own definitions?
We don't have "our own definitions;" we have the definitions mutually established and agreed on through the experimental process you described in the preceding paragraph.
Hence the excessive neologisms - it frees you from the baggage of your experiences and allows you to construct an abstract definition.
What "excessive neologisms?" If I'm trying to communicate with someone else, we'll be using words that already exist in one or the other's language. And what makes you think I need an "abstract definition?"
...This works fine in your own mind, but once you start a dialog, other people start using the word and you lose control of its definition.
Of course I do -- the whole point of using a word is that its definition is established beforehand, so everyone understands what I'm saying when I use the word and no one can move the goalposts for dishonest and/or demagogic purposes. It's not about "control of definition;" it's about mutual understanding of the definition, which then enables us to control our messages by leaving less room for misrepresentation when we choose our words.
Once injected into dialog, these words are even weaker than longer standing ones since they are defined by fewer examples.
I'm sorry, I have no clue what you're getting at. As long as there are enough "examples" to get the point across, I can use a word with enough confidence that I won't be misunderstood.
So you get lots of writing that makes perfect sense to the author, but is gibberish to others.
Only if you're a crappy writer, and/or can't learn a new language well enough to communicate in it.
We don't have "our own definitions;" we have the definitions mutually established and agreed on through the experimental process you described in the preceding paragraph.
What I intended to establish via this thought experiment is that the abstract definitions we form based on experience are not necessarily in 100% agreement and that we can communicate without them being so. No number of examples will guarantee alignment between these definitions - kind of like how no finite number of values of a function will allow you with absolute confidence to say what that function is.
I shifted away from my thought experiment into a discussion of postmodern philsophical writing when I started the second paragraph - I should've made that clearer, but I'll try to address the issues you brought up that would still be relevant.
What I'm trying to get at in the second paragraph is that since we don't know what definition of a word another person holds, we can never know that the understanding is mutual, and sometimes we don't even know what our own definition is (the classic example of this is "to be", which everybody understands but nobody can define without a circular reference). The temptation is to create a new term and anchor it on something objective. But once you try to communicate the definition you assigned to that term to another person, you either have to rely on other terms, with their associated problems, or examples, which can never provide a full definition.
What I intended to establish via this thought experiment is that the abstract definitions we form based on experience are not necessarily in 100% agreement and that we can communicate without them being so. No number of examples will guarantee alignment between these definitions - kind of like how no finite number of values of a function will allow you with absolute confidence to say what that function is.
This is perfectly true -- but as long as the majority have enough sense of personal responsibility to keep their heads out of their asses, and be aware enough to understand how others interpret words, it's not a problem worth thinking about, except when you're dealing entirely in abstractions; which, per Orwell's sage advice, we should avoid for that very reason.
What I'm trying to get at in the second paragraph is that since we don't know what definition of a word another person holds, we can never know that the understanding is mutual, and sometimes we don't even know what our own definition is...
In theory, this is true. In practice, however, this sort of speculation leads to a kind of paranoid solipsism in which we retreat into our own little bubbble-microverses, and can never trust each other to "really" understand what we're saying, ever. Sort of a more educated-sounding version of a petulant teenager whining "It's no use talkng to you, you'll never understand me!" I'm not an expert in linguistics or postmodern philosophy (or any philosophy for that matter), but I have very little patience with this sort of thinking: it causes paralysis by sowing doubt, and offers no corrective or alternative solution; and any PoMo philosopher who actually has time for it really needs to get a job.
Just my two ramblin' cents...