[TheForge] [OT][OT][OT] RE: was stoopid question, about academia, more beer-chatter)

[Mike Spencer]

Bob quoth:

>>  hiding behind their foucault.
>
> what does that mean?

       (Using up my entire  "TheForge [OT]" allotment for 2005 in one
       (go.... :-)


Summary: The post-modernist equivalent of "fake it", "punt" or
         "hand-waving".


Once upon a time, there were some very bright French Guys, of whom
Michel Foucault was one.  These French Guys wanted to say:

   Before you put it in your mouth, look at exactly what's on the end
   of your fork.

Any blacksmith could have understood that.  Instead, they said/wrote a
vast bunch or incredibly abstruse stuff in highly academic French.
That stuff was translated into even more abstruse English.  Mediocre
English-speaking academics fell in love with these billows of
incomprehensible verbiage and began to cut and paste words and even
whole chunks of it into their own writing and lectures.

Soon, doing this became almost mandatory in many liberal arts venues.

By 1996, it was possible to write whole, lengthy academic papers
comprised of (more or less) random chunks of this jargon, pasted
together (more or less) grammatically and have them accepted by
journals as serious academic research.  [1]

Any person accomplished in this jargon domain, can, when asked some
question, spew endless strings of this stuff, completely burying and
obfuscating the vacuity of the speaker's mind.  Although typically
content-free and semantically empty, it is not permitted to say so (in
the post-modern academic context) without loss of face.

Transformatively yours [2],

- Imafa Kinasso, Ph.D., FRCSVAT [5][6]

---------

[1] See: 

  http://ca.dir.yahoo.com/Arts/Humanities/Cultural_Studies/Sokal_Hoax/

    Full text:

       "Transgressing the boundaries: Towards a transformative
       hermeneutics of quantum gravity" -- Alan Sokal, Social Text,
       1996

  http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/transgress_v2/transgress_v2.html


[2]  The discourse of the blacksmiting community, for all its
     undeniable value, cannot assert a privileged epistemological
     status with respect to counter-hegemonic narratives emanating
     from dissident or marginalized communities. [3]

[3]  This stuff has to have lots of footnotes.  It doesn't matter what
     they say. [4]

[4]  Aren't you glad you're a blacksmith?

[5]  Imafa Kinasso does not exist.

[6]  Fellow of the Royal Canadian Society of Virtual Academic Twits