um, sorry don't know how to do the quote boxes, but xpost
"Whilst I agree with you about theoretical fanaticism, this is just anti-intellectual bollocks. The reason people talk in the 'riddled language' is that the stuff they're talking about is difficult and requires a certain amount of training and discipline to engage with properly. Do you whine about chemists talking about stuff you don't understand? What about mathemeticians with their equations it takes years to master; are they deliberately excluding you with their secret codes?"
Hmm, i still would single out theory as an area in which vagary, of the the emperor's new clothes kind, is positively encouraged. If not the book, then the whole debate around Sokal etc's Intellectual Impostures (which exposed precisley the lack of "training and discipline" betrayed by a huge amount of contemporary theory, particularly that which appropriated scientific terminology) see http://www.nous.org.uk/Sokal.html
So you learnt French to read Deleuze. I think that says quite a lot about the outlook of the would-be theoretician. Perhaps learning French to experience the culture, the literature or the people would provide you with a more rounded outlook. I am not being anti-intellectual by arguing that devoting your life to a small, entirely abstract area of academically constructed theoretical debate might not be particularly interesting to anyone other than the small clique you would surround yourself with as a result.
Chemists make drugs that are used in hospitals. Mathemeticians work with equations which feed into technology that improves people's everday lives. Like it or not, there is not an equivalent in the case of the Deleuzian academic.
I'm all for the idea of the public intellectual; a figure who positively engages, criticises and interrogates contemporary society. People like Foucault or Said who were prepared to write for a wider audience without the need to constantly coin mystifying neologisms or resort to hiding behind secondarily received terminology. But the onanistic k-wank that's being spawned around here are ideas which scarcely ever manage to transcend the egos of those that formed them.
"Whilst I agree with you about theoretical fanaticism, this is just anti-intellectual bollocks. The reason people talk in the 'riddled language' is that the stuff they're talking about is difficult and requires a certain amount of training and discipline to engage with properly. Do you whine about chemists talking about stuff you don't understand? What about mathemeticians with their equations it takes years to master; are they deliberately excluding you with their secret codes?"
Hmm, i still would single out theory as an area in which vagary, of the the emperor's new clothes kind, is positively encouraged. If not the book, then the whole debate around Sokal etc's Intellectual Impostures (which exposed precisley the lack of "training and discipline" betrayed by a huge amount of contemporary theory, particularly that which appropriated scientific terminology) see http://www.nous.org.uk/Sokal.html
So you learnt French to read Deleuze. I think that says quite a lot about the outlook of the would-be theoretician. Perhaps learning French to experience the culture, the literature or the people would provide you with a more rounded outlook. I am not being anti-intellectual by arguing that devoting your life to a small, entirely abstract area of academically constructed theoretical debate might not be particularly interesting to anyone other than the small clique you would surround yourself with as a result.
Chemists make drugs that are used in hospitals. Mathemeticians work with equations which feed into technology that improves people's everday lives. Like it or not, there is not an equivalent in the case of the Deleuzian academic.
I'm all for the idea of the public intellectual; a figure who positively engages, criticises and interrogates contemporary society. People like Foucault or Said who were prepared to write for a wider audience without the need to constantly coin mystifying neologisms or resort to hiding behind secondarily received terminology. But the onanistic k-wank that's being spawned around here are ideas which scarcely ever manage to transcend the egos of those that formed them.