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

[Michael H. Murphy]

Eschew obfuscation.

Murf

> -----Original Message-----
> From: theforge-bounces at mailman.qth.net [mailto:theforge-
> bounces at mailman.qth.net] On Behalf Of Mike Spencer
> Sent: Wednesday, February 23, 2005 5:34 PM
> To: theforge at mailman.qth.net
> Subject: [TheForge] [OT][OT][OT] RE: was stoopid question,about academia,
> more beer-chatter)
> 
> 
> 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
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> 
>