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AlanCrowe comments on A Kick in the Rationals: What hurts you in your LessWrong Parts? - Less Wrong
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I have a lit-crit friend who I have known for a better part of a decade. We have an ongoing struggle to understand each other, and as part of this we will occasionally trade ideas the other finds incomprehensible. As part of this cultural exchange process, she decided to send me something about one of my subjects (econ) in 'her language', and linked me to this.
Needless to say, this was like a cannonball to my LessWrong Parts.
As much as I do find this sort of stuff distressing, I also find it useful for helping me explain precisely why I'm so confident in dismissing it as informationally bankrupt. The general retort from the literary type is that these sorts of texts contain lots of specialist language and ideas, and just as you wouldn't expect a lay-person to understand a maths or physics paper off the bat, you shouldn't expect to understand something like the above.
To which I respond "my arse". Papers in disciplines I consider to be respectable, but lack any deeper knowledge of, have a recognisable argument structure, even if I don't necessarily understand the arguments. Also, any epistemology worth having should demand claims be provided with means of substantiating them, or at the very least show why the status of the claim matters. Anything not meeting this criteria falls into Not-Even-Wrong territory.
(Also on a more speculative basis, if you're explaining a Very Hard Maths Principle to someone, your language may become more arcane depending on your audience, but the overall structure of the argument should be made in such a way that's easy for a brain to process, as both a pragmatic design principle and a courtesy to the reader; the above piece, which is amongst the more lucid critical theory stuff I've come across, seems wilfully hard for a brain to process. If someone can get onto a Ph.D. program and still have such abysmal communication skills, they can't be communicating anything that important.)
I should probably mention that I'm never sure whether my friend is trolling me or not.
The linked essay makes perfect sense to me; and I'm certain the only reason it doesn't to you is indeed just the jargon. I don't think it's a particularly good analysis, ultimately, but for boring reasons that would make any essay weak, not because it's saying nothing. It's also not attempting to be a knock-down argument, not on account of its theoretical stance, but because it's a short blog post firing off some impressions in a perhaps unjustifiably confident tone, which of course Manly Man Rational Economists(tm) do all the time.
That said, my acquired intuition is that within [the cluster of people/ideaspace that the typical LessWrong reader would ugh-field as "pomo"], as within many other clusters, the lack of clarity in language does certainly covary with lack of clarity in actual thought. But I can't really say how much my own tribal academic loyalties (or desire to believe that I can understand anything that means anything) have helped produce that sensation.
If the linked essay make perfect sense to you, perhaps you can explain this sentence
If we took fifty literature postgrads from across the English speaking world, and asked them to explain the sentence, would they give consistent answers?
If they were familiar with the way Deleuzians phrase things then about 80% would, is my guess. Mostly the quality of postgrads is pretty poor because lots of philosophy professors suck, which influences this.
I got the same interpretation as Tim S though. I've read some D(&G) stuff before.
"Infinite" is just Deleuzians being overdramatic and imprecise with language. Or, perhaps they're not trying to convey the logic of the argument so much as the idea or feel of the argument. Deleuzians often have a hard time seeing the division between things like logic and persuasion and bias. They're right insofar as there is no hard concrete division between those things, but it sometimes makes them lazy.
RE: Below comments: "flows" mean something specific within Deleuzian terminology. It implies interconnectedness and chains of causality with uncountable numbers of variables interacting with whatever it is that they're talking about. It also has implications related to perceiving objects as dynamic rather than as static.
Once you understand the jargon and have read his arguments a bit it's actually sort of pleasant to read Deleuze's stuff. His frequent use of metaphors allows him to make subtle references to other comments and arguments that he's made in the past. It's like how jargon is useful, except the benefit is not precision but is rather the breadth of meaning which each phrase can convey. Also, it's almost never that the associations of arguments invalidate the misinterpretation, but that the misinterpretation overlooks specific shades of meaning. It's difficult to interpret on some rare occasions but once it's interpreted there's a lot of meaning in it.
Most of the Deleuzian secondary authors suck though. They give me headaches.
Even as a post-modernist, I wouldn't say I'm impressed with the average post-modern thinker. In other words, I don't know the answer to your question, and am not confident that it would reflect well on post-modern thought.
I will say that post-modern art theory (as opposed to political theory) is least impressive to me. It always seemed to me like art critics have already said all the interesting things that aren't post-modern, so post-modern literary criticism is the only way to say something new. And if it isn't new, it doesn't get published. But this is an uninformed outsiders impression.
In my rock critic days I found it a useful tool in writing about and understanding pop culture. ('80s British pop music is what you'd get if you tried monetising postmodernism, and I don't just mean ZTT.) It's the sort of thing you really want to have a use for before you bother with it more than casually.
(I still think in terms of critical understanding of stuff all the time and read books of criticism for enjoyment, even of artistic fields I know nothing about. I realised a while ago that if I were doing for a job the thing I would be best at, I'd be a professor of critical theory and paid a lot less than I am as a sysadmin.)
Should the test be done by asking postgrads or professors? Why one or the other?
I chose postgrads because the counterpoint would be asking, say, statistics postgrads what a moderately arcane piece of stats terminology means in context.
We then have the extra avenue of asking professors. The stats professors should give answers consistent with the postgrads, because stats terminology should be consistent in the public domain; the professors may know more about it, but they don't have any normative influence as to what the terminology means.
Will the literature professors have answers consistent with, but more knowledgeable than, their postgrad students, or will they be something different altogether?
Is there a good pomo vocabulary guide somewhere? (I'm assuming 'sovereign' and 'conjoining flows' are pomo jargon)
I'm not aware of any special meaning for "conjoining flow." I assumed it was a metaphor and interpreted it in light of the next sentence in the essay.
Post-modernism loves metaphor and hyperbole, for better or worse. I readily acknowledge that frequent use of those styles impedes readability.
Not pomo jargon. It just means the supreme authority, like the King or the State. Used extensively in Political Science.
~~What? That's not answering my question (at least, why ignore 'cojoining flows'?). And~~ I get what sovereign means in this context like I get what synergy means among management, but 'synergy' is still management jargon.
If you ask two questions in one comment, and someone knows the answer to one of the questions, what would you like that person to do?
My bad, I confused TimS with thomblake (because their names are so similar). I wrongly thought TimS was only explaining what sovereign meant even though they interpreted 'cojoining flows' somehow. But even so, sovereign could still be jargon unless thom is familiar enough with pomo to say otherwise--it's not enough that it's used in other contexts as well (I thought it might be jargon because I've heard continental philosophers using it often enough before).
But post-modernism is a type of political theory. Therefore, it borrows some jargon from more mainstream political theory.
It's also a type of literary criticism theory. As applied to literary criticism, it doesn't impress me, but most literary criticism doesn't impress me, so that's not a very meaningful statement.
I didn't read the essay, but taking a swing at the sentence, it could be a reference to the lending and re-lending of fractional reserve banking creating a larger money supply than what was issued by the sovereign. I'm not sure where "infinite" enters into it, though... maybe it is meant to mean "unending" rather than "innumerable"?
"Back in the day, in Hanson's farmer epoch, public morality was maintained in part by cultivating in people a sense of gratitude towards God/the universe/society/one's parents/the resident nepotist with a sword; that their existence entailed debts that in principle couldn't be repaid. Nowadays under liberalism we've in principle thrown that out but everybody's still linked in a web of very explicit debts, and the web doesn't in principle have a center."
(You might say that this is a massive oversimplification to the extent that it's true, and you'd be right, of course.)