Academics Talk Shite November 2007

Towards the Subjective: The Impossiblity of Discourse Occuring on Campus

From visionary extra special guest writer ...

GED MURRAY

Do you ever get the feeling that one of your lecturers may not know what they are talking about? Perhaps you feel they do know but cannot communicate certain concepts simply? I do, anyway, and I’ve done research that suggests I may be right.

Too often have I or a classmate asked a straightforward question, only for those who would teach us to retreat back into abstraction, shitting out a stream of meaningless words like a frightened octopus does ink. I believe that, at best, this is a kind of snobbery (he must be right, listen to those Latin suffixes) or, at worst, simply a mask for fuzzy thinking. George Orwell wrote at length about the perversion of the English language in Nineteen Eighty Four and his essay, Politics and the English Language. His fear was, basically, that if you can talk nonsense while sounding reasonable you can wind up thinking nonsense while seeming reasonable. I hope you now see that we are living in a genuine Orwellian nightmare (Ah! A neologism! (no! and now a suffix!)) This Orwellian system doesn’t revolve around Big Brother torturing us all for sexcrimes but is still fairly annoying.

Here’s a little gem from a handout I was given: ‘The dynamics of networks push society towards an endless supersession and reconstruction of its values and institutions, towards a meta-social, constant rearrangement of human institutions and organisations’. That sentence means fuck all. Well, actually it means that networks constantly force social change. Saying that, though, wouldn’t sound nearly so authoritative. People trust statements to be true when they cannot analyse them for themselves. This bollocks has infected academia and is designed to make us feel like the mediaeval peasant at Latin mass; trusting that the priest knows what he’s talking about. This idea was tested in the ‘Dr. Fox’ experiment of 1972 which I chanced upon recently. Dr. Myron L. Fox looked and spoke like a respected academic. He was a respected academic. He was also working with a psychiatrist to see if college graduates could detect crap. He did this by giving a series of speeches about his essay Game Theory as Applied to Physical Education. Afterwards, he was evaluated by those present. Amazingly 80% of the audience thought he was ‘outstanding’ and had ‘stimulated their thinking’. It didn’t matter that his speech was a jumble of contradictory jargon devoid of meaning. It sounded right. Even the 20% that didn’t think of him positively didn’t seem to do so because they had realised the gag.
Fair enough, you might say. People who aren’t experts in the field may be easily duped but surely respected academics themselves are made of smarter stuff. Not so, it seems.

The Sokal hoax of 1996 involved Alan Sokal, a physics professor assembling a series of claims from people like Jacques Derrida and arranging these claims to formulate the theory that reality is a socially constructed, bourgeois illusion. At one point it was argued that the theory E=mc2 was sexist because it favours the ‘masculine’ E over other ‘feminine speeds that are vitally necessary to us’. You would think any half sane person would see that this had to be a joke. Not the people at Social Text, a postmodernist journal, who published it in a special edition issue that aimed to ‘uncover the gender laden and racist assumptions built into the Euro-American scientific method’. Think about that for a moment…

…OK. It’s one thing to be tricked by someone who speaks well without saying anything. It’s another to actually believe that a series of bizarre claims like the one above prove some point about the racist, evil West. This is serious stuff. I know that these pranks hardly debunk all academia. What I also know, though, is that so many people talk shite that there’s a good chance a few of them believe it, too. I don’t like it.

Published in BrassMonkey - iadt Student paper Nov 07

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