Ideology vs Aesthetics

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>>11236389
>intellectually pleasing fits/garments
care to explain or define in your pseudo-intellectual drivel first? i don't see how you expect any civil discussion when you start off a thread acting high-and mighty with some vague, pretentious bullshit

>>11236395
Where can I get this, God damn

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>>11236395
not OP but care to explain how "intellectually pleasing outfits" is pseudo-intellectual? i think you're letting your ideology get the best of you anon

>>11236395
Shut up and stop over thinking things, pleb. I'm trying to distinguish between outfits/garments that have some developed ideas going on (yes, like in that pic) and, like, heavily branded things/shitty tailored, well styled fits that don't "push the envelope" in any way

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>>11236389

>>11236389
>/fa/ buys into the GQ image

did i wake up in 2009? or are you just completely out of touch with /fa/?

that fit you posted is siq. but saying things like
>intellectually pleasing garments
in a thread titled
>Ideology vs Aesthetics
makes you seem like a 19 year old philosophy student at Underachiever State University who just started reading critical theory this past semester.

Isn't it so cool how Le Frankfurt Escuela writes incomprehensibly? We're so deep because we pretend like we understand Lacan.

The ironic part is that crit theory is a better embodiment of the emporer's new clothes phenomenon than any actual clothing-related fashion trend could be.

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>>11236389
Fashion doesn't need to push ideas or even push anything aesthetically, though certain cores might. Personally I cant wear anything that's close to goth ninja or rick, just because it isn't me, its not my personality.

IMO, fashion is an extension of one's personality and attitude, not ideas or aesthetics. Thats a reason why Punk, and most "edgy" styles were popular because they pushed and expressed one's personality.

>>11236436
Great, let's get some more discussion like this going, fellow philosophy major

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>>11236442
wrong wrong wrong. art as self-expression only began in the early 20th century with matisse and such. before then and even until now, its all about ideas and concepts

>>11236483
That's great! I won't pretend to understand the choice of shoe, though

>>11236408
Not positive but looks alot like Harnden or Dawson. Might also check out Poeme Boheim for a more affordable take on that look

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>>11236483

reminds me of this

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>>11236490
thom browne is all about contradictions and playing with ideas related to prep. see pic related. i think the face mask also gives hints as to why he chose the shoes

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>>11236460
Humans are needy creatures, and we don't about the big picture but we think about ourselves. Yes we can use fashion, especially art for ideas and concepts, hell, look at the swinging 60s, Punk rock and coco in the 20's pushing the ideas of women should be covered up.

But, nowadays, the present, fashion's been over simplified with fast fashion and people wearing what compliments themselves. Fuck, look at all the chads that always wear the same shit because they all think alike and are /normcore/.

Maybe soon in the future we'll be more brave and try push a movement, but its not today

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>>11236517
we can only hope anon

>Who /PHILO101/ here?

Jesus this shit is painful to read

>>11236637
I was trying to start a dialogue on something that doesn't get talked about enough on a fashion board

>>11236654
Then maybe you should take some writing classes to learn how to evolve your thoughts so they come out component then. Right now you sound like a raving lunatic

>>11236415
care to explain "intellectually pleasing outfits"?
unbeknownst to you, smashing words together doesn't necessarily mean anything of substance.

>>11236428
i hit the nail right on the head
"intellectually pleasing outfits" doesn't fucking mean anything, if you had started the thread with some semblance of clarity like what you said in this post, i wouldn't have called you out for being a pretentious prick with nothing of value to actually say

>>11236395
Marcel Duchamp often talked about "art of the eyes vs. art of the mind." Think of the fashion equivalent to Duchamp's "art of the mind."

This is not "high and mighty" at all. And, normal people can have perfectly civil discussion about art without someone constantly asking "define why this is art" (which is only a small step above saying "my five-year-old could do this!").

>>11236727
i wasn't asking him to define why something is art, or what he thinks art is

i was asking him to be more clear about what he was he supposedly wanted to discuss, because we both know "intellectually pleasing fits" can mean just about anything or absolutely nothing

>>11236750
No, it really is in the same vein. When I read the OP, I immediately though of "art of the eyes vs. art of the mind" stuff.

What really is so unclear? OP wants to ask for fits that would stimulate thought. Not necessarily about symbolism, or whatever - but conscious fashion decision that would really make the observer think about what exactly the wearer was trying to do (artistically) with the outfit (e.g. in terms of form, color, symmetry, balance, etc.).

>>11236750
>>11236713
>>11236677
Triggered and missing the point. You guys sound like Redditors. Contribute to TT or fuck off back to your fucboi general threads

>>11236781
op mad he got btfo

>>11236769
Ty anon, that's a great explanation

>>11236799
This, OP visited SZ for the first time and now thinks he is "le enlightened bean". All that had been asked of is to clarify and you are obviously to stupid or afraid to do that, so you might as well delete your garbage thread and read a little bit before you try this again.

>arguing semantics instead of posting
philosophy majors everyone

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hey guy's let's have a thread of perceptually stimulating fits/garments

>>11236436
I think a very quiet but sizeable quantity of people on /fa/ buy into the GQ image more than you give credit for. At the very least, it's more present then you think.

Love everything else you've said, especially the emperor's new clothes bit.

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A very sad but stern OP here. I'm not even mad, I'm just genuinely upset that so many of you are so superficial. All of the highfalutin arguing about "enlightenment" aside, there are some really nice fits ITT

>>11236415
>>11236435
>>11236483
>>11236517

Keep them coming

>>11236899
kill urself my man

Just wear a T-shirt and jeans fag

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>>11237564

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>>11237577
i almost vomited with this

>>11237979
I wish issey would hug me in that.

>>11237577
lmao reddit

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>>11236436
>>11236890
>le emperor's new clothes meme
the ironic part is that crying the "emperor's new clothes" wolf is emblematic of a century old lower class insecurity regarding high art that resulted in them self-obstructing their own access to it when given. the anecdote goes: the early 20th century avant-garde wanted to bring art out of the exclusive realm of the upper classes, to the working man, by making universal art. the iconic example: malevich's black square. no more obscurely coded references or exclusive contextualization, these were works any human could enjoy as well as any other.

but did they? no. they saw this simplistic work and thought it must be those ebil upper class with too much free time playing a sick joke on me. they're all just pretending this stuff is innovative and classic, opening up their galleries in the middle of the city for me to see, but I'm not going to fall for it!

and so they didn't. that's the story of how the lower class won, and lost art.

And here you are, still perpetuating the same absurd insecurities, trying to convince yourself that you, in your "authentically" ignorant innocence, can see right through what artists, curators, collectors and critics who invest so much into studying the field cannot.

when it's exactly that massive ego of yours that's stopping you from enjoying what they can

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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>>11236842
Still fudging it. Omit "perceptually" and we're finally getting somewhere

>>11236460
>matisse
this. we need more klein and less matisse in this world

>>11238651
that post is making fun of op for being a fucking retard lmao

"perceptually stimulating" describes pretty much everything

>>11238638

>trying to convince yourself that you, in your "authentically" ignorant innocence, can see right through what artists, curators, collectors and critics who invest so much into studying the field cannot.

that's a complete strawman. you're misreading the entire conversation.

i don't argue against intellectual or artistic pursuits. i argue against fashionable obscuratinism. i also make fun of the speech patterns (and the lofty self-importance) of people who started reading aesthetic theory very recently and who try to say the word "ideology" in every sentence, but that's rather beside the point.

many critics and philosophers are intentionally obscure. they do not even need be readily aware of this intentionality for it to operate in their writing. to put it simply, critics, theorists, and philosophers have the bad habit of confusing complex writing for good writing. i find this especially true in the fields of aesthetics and art criticism, but you can trace the meme of baroque complexity in philosophical writing back to at least hegel if you like, and very likely even further than that.

i do not claim that there is never a purpose for jargonistic terms or run-on multiple-compound, multiple-parenthetical sentence construction. i say this now to avoid further strawman representation. but i do draw a distinction between the necessary evil of occasionally dense prose and flat out linguistic posturing. which is, unfortunately, what a lot of aesthetic theory is, or at least how it's presented.

and when we're in undergrad reading these "greats" we have this chip on our shoulder as students. because the academy looms overhead, because it seems overly difficult to decode theory at first -- and that grates against our self-concepts as bright/capable/whatever. eventually we learn to read theory intelligibly and start to wear it like a badge of intellectualism. start referring to things as "intellectually stimulating" and using aesthetic memewords... (continued)

>>11238727
thanks for spending the time i couldn't be bothered to spend to explain why op's a pretentious prick

>>11238727

(continued).... in everyday speech. it's all posturing, trying to publicly self-identify as intellectual. it comes across as very insecure, and it pervades academia as well, especially in the humanities -- where we read dense (and often translated, which doesn't help matters) and complex prose as our exemplars, and eventually emulate that same writing style.

good writing is clear and simple. even complex ideas can be represented with clear and simple language. the poetry of crit theory, with its reputation for near incomprehensibility, is a big circlejerk of people using their 'understanding' of it as social capital and as a way to prove to themselves that their self-concept as a "smart person" is sound.

the conversations and questions and ideas that make people first fall in love with philosophy -- and which deal with complex ideas -- are ultimately plain-spoken. who are we? why are we here? what should we do? how should we do it?

applied to aesthetics: is there good art? what makes it good? why do we like the art we like? what meaning does art hold?

we shouldn't encourage shit like "the post-structuralist ideology critique of the kafkaesque ideology of subsumed thought in cultural verisimilitude of the subconscious conceptual analogue of the quotidian experience represented by mere phantoms of blah blah blah". that's not good writing. it's an unfortunate side effect of people attempting to "make it" in an academic career.

>>11238638
>anyone who rejects something previously labeled as "art" by some authority figure is a pleb who just doesn't get it
anon confirmed as the girl who did the interior semiotics piece

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>>11238727
>meme of baroque complexity
yes but the important thing is that everyone is aware of it, not only those who aren't invested in the field.

"Emperor's new clothes" suggests there's NOTHING of value, the entire item is a sham resulting from social signaling. This might be true of a lot of hack artists and theorists who stumble their way into hype, but it's incredibly ignorant to think it truly describes even the majority of work in theory or art.

The insecure use the meme as a ground for dismissal because they're scared that engagement might force them to acknowledge that there IS substance they're unable to appreciate with their level of education and exposure. The horror. It's much more rewarding to maintain a sense of elitism towards an imagined elitism, and there's nothing to lose for a normalfag just trying to save face in front of his wife at a museum. But it's an extremely toxic indulgence for anyone actually engaged in the arts.

It's completely absurd to be uncomfortable with the possibility that a critic, for example, might actually be talking over your head and not simply pretending to be

>>11238757
Yes OP is writing pedantically and it is something students do and it is unfortunate. That wasn't what my post discussed.

>that's not good writing
It isn't. Jargon is useful in two places for opposite reasons: for clear and efficient communication when the audience shares your familiarity with a complex specified subject, and for unclear and inefficient communication for propping up shallow content with an audience that can't parse the code

>>11238727
>complains about superfluous, baroque and deliberately abstruse communication
>calls for parsimony where possible
>writes textwall

>>11237577
guess i wont buy sambas now

>>11238773
>The insecure use the meme as a ground for dismissal because they're scared that engagement might force them to acknowledge that there IS substance they're unable to appreciate with their level of education and exposure
nice, ive thought about this but havent formulated it in words really. you did so very well

>>11238789
it's a great argument that harkens back to /pol/s belief that anyone who doesn't like Trump is a cuck who is afraid to acknowledge the contradictions between the socialism and identity politics wings of modern liberalism
It's a useful logical fallacy where you brand someone a cuck (or insufficiently educated or whatever label you prefer) and work your way back from there

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>>11238800
Argument of the fallacy, and you can apply the same in reverse. Brand any criticism/work that's beyond you as emperor's new clothes hidden behind high theory and work your way backwards.

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>>11236389
>goes on unwoven once

>>11238773

>It's completely absurd to be uncomfortable with the possibility that a critic, for example, might actually be talking over your head and not simply pretending to be

No issue with this. Though if we encouraged and taught clearer writing, I don't think it would happen very often once the reader - who for the sake of this statement I will assume is of average intelligence - was acclimated to a few field-specific terms.

>>11238776

i never claimed to be a good writer.

that said, i don't think a few paragraphs of length really adds any level of superfluous difficulty. it might be unnecessary or repetitive, i'll give you that. but it's plain spoken and clear. you take my meaning without issue.

this whole conversation reminded me of the joke that kant was such a shitty writer but a great thinker that people copied his shitty writing in hopes to have ideas of the same merit as his

>>11238844

when we teach with bad writing we create bad writers.

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>>11236442
This pretty much, is more like an extention of who you are, thats why some people can pull of certain things and others not.

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>>11236389
At this moment in time i am extremely high off a tolerance break and i must say that i completely understand what it is that you are trying to say.
-yours truly

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>>11238830
really I think it's the french's fault or maybe just how their language read in translation. English theory is usually pretty straightforward

but still, there really isn't any excuse for a student/casual reader to resort to assuming the theorist is a hack everytime he runs into something he can't wrap his head around. especially if that something is venerated by the field.

he should be embarrassed to entertain the suspicion for even a second. chances are very stacked against him that he's just unacclimated.

The thought process leading them to think otherwise is so delusional and egotistical, I'm constantly amazed at how common it is.

I mean, it's so obviously idiotic a method that it would, in a better world than this one, preclude the assumption of even an average intelligence.

fucking normalfags. they have no humility.

ITT: butthurt analytics who can't into hegel

>>11238891

>butthurt continental who is mad that cliff's notes can represent hegel's ideas clearer than hegel can

>>11238897
>butthurt analytic who says that hegel is all muh thesis, antithesis, synthesis

>>11238913

jokes on you i haven't even read hegel for like 5 years and barely remember any of it.

nor do i plan to in the near future.

nor will i need to, ever.

>>11238928
yeah go jack off to carnap in the corner and continue your quest of making philosophy like science

>>11238977

that's a cool little false dilemma you've set up there. must be nice to have everything boxed away so neatly.

ITT: Philosophy majors and minors argue about nothing to try to make the most out of their degree, in an attempt to hide the crippling reality of their worthless degree

>>11239460
>said the stemfag as he adjusts his fedora with a copy of the god delusion in one hand and cheetos dust on the other

>>11239672
>tips fedora: the post

>>11236537
what is this beautiful thing?

what is 'the GQ image'?

>>11239827
clothes that normal people wear

aside from the initial faggotry, this turned out to be an interesting thread
>>11238638
>>11238727
>>11238757
>>11238773
>>11238800
>>11238871
cheers, gave me something to think about

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>>11239782
Seashell coat from issey miyake's pleats please line. Not sure which collection

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dude minimalism lmao

>>11239961
lmao /r/minimalism

>>11236395
This looks really cool actually, ID on the jacket, pants and vest in this?

>>11239968
those flops don't even know what minimalism is m8

>>11236483
this was one of Browne's best collections for fall IMO.

The industry has been trending in the direction for leisure and function lately, so angular crotch-pieces and hand-sewn musculature aren't fair play in the office just yet. Wake me up in 2020.

>>11240278
that collection was spring m8 but i get your point

>>11236517
you're a pretentious idiot. this movement you want pushed is already being pushed. You said it yourself- oversimplified. its minimal. If you honestly can't see what's going on around you and hark back to the 20s or the 60s then you obviously have no clue about modern culture.

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>>11236436
>>11238638

>>11238757 :
>we shouldn't encourage shit like "the post-structuralist ideology critique of the kafkaesque ideology of subsumed thought in cultural verisimilitude of the subconscious conceptual analogue of the quotidian experience represented by mere phantoms of blah blah blah". that's not good writing. it's an unfortunate side effect of people attempting to "make it" in an academic career.

No academic currently writes or ever wrote like this, or at least not in any reputable journal / press. This isn’t even a good imitation of obscurantism. If Anon knew what he was talking about, he would at least dig up an actual quote, probably from a philosopher, probably Lacan, or Deleuze and Guattari, or maybe even Heidegger. That he doesn't give us an actual example shows that the object of his critique is imaginary. What he calls "fashionable obscurantism" doesn't refer to anything. Anon is confused about how academic writing can be substantial because his own understanding of that writing is too flimsy to support an argument against it. If all you can do is (badly) imitate the posture of philosophical thought, and not its substance, then of course you're going to mischaracterize it as empty posturing.

Here’s a quote from Walter Benjamin (quoted in a book on Walter van Beirendonck. It's from "Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century," one of Benjamin’s exposés for what would become the Arcades Project):

“Fashion prescribed the ritual by which the fetish commodity wishes to be worshipped.”

Now we have an actual example of a Frankfurt School theorist’s “incomprehensible” writing.

>>11240662
>>11240662

Lmao ah yes. Because I didn't bother to dig up a quote to support my 4chan post that I wrote on my phone while I was taking a shit, my argument is invalidated.

Classic.

Consider the following: if a claim is true, then it is true regardless of how well or poorly it is presented in argument. even if i offer no evidence, that does not affect whether or not my thesis has merit. At most it just means I'm a shitty writer. Clash with my content, not my presentation.

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>>11240662

E.G. the bolded sentence, which starts off relatively readable (if however jargon-laden) but becomes a garbled mess. Thanks Professor Butler

>>11240706
holy shit English really needs grammatical cases

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http://stevenpinker.com/why-academics-stink-writing

>>11240690
haha my point is not to say that you have to present a fully fleshed out claim complete with citations. you're right; no one expects that here.

Also, I don't totally disagree with your claim. yes, there is bad, conceptually fuzzy, self-important writing out there. And maybe your account of the identity crisis / marking of group identity behind complex prose is partially right (tho it verges on a gross reduction to psychology / sociology).

My point is simply that >shit like "the post-structuralist ideology critique..." etc.
does not represent the use of obscurity by critics / philosophers / theorists. not just because it's not an actual quote, but more importantly because it doesn't even look like bad theory writing. So it makes it seem like you're not really familiar with the terrain. (even though you're happy to use a concept like "social capital" to claim that something called "critical theory" is void of content.)

>>11240706
thank you for bringing an actual example in

>>11238727
>>11238757
Good posts.

>and when we're in undergrad reading these "greats" we have this chip on our shoulder as students
>it comes across as very insecure, and it pervades academia as well, especially in the humanities

This is pretty much why I never liked discussing philosophy on /lit/. People there like to discard their common sense and critical reasoning when reading an obscure philosopher because they treat these people like seers or mystics. I personally think this attitude carries over from reading high literature, where we sometimes treat the author as some kind of untouchable authority or mystic who deep insight into life that we don't.

>>11240758

I don't think it's devoid of content. As you noted, I even employ concepts from the field.

This is where I am somewhat inconsistent: Whereas I called for you to ignore my shitty style and focus on my content, I think that the shitty style of crit theorists is worthy of critique. I draw this distinction because of the stakes—I am not being upheld by the academy as an example. Many obscure crit therosists are. And this causes students to emulate them—to create bad imitations of bad writing. Eventually this becomes a hyper real simulacra (shout out to Baudrillard) of bad imitators imitating other bad imitators.

Surely phil students should be exposed to the ideas of crit theorists. And of course there's merit to reading the original, because all paraphrase is flawed and incomplete. But I think we (not necessarily you and me, but the field) should include in our teaching of these thinkers that their writing styles (sometimes due to translation) were shit and should be avoided in our own writing wherever possible.

Weird part is that programs teach many clear writers as well. This is where I believe the fashionability of obscurity operates. It's not sexy to read and understand clear writers. It's not exclusive. It doesn't make a student feel like they're part of a special intellectual club. We should, however, uphold clear writers as exemplars of good academic writing. Or something.

>>11240878
To be clear, I too think bad imitators imitating other bad imitators is bad.

But sometimes writing has to be difficult. Writing addressed to an academic public assumes that the reader has been trained to a certain level of comfort with difficult texts. This assumption allows it to take shortcuts that it couldn't take if it was addressing a general public. It’s not about feeling like you belong to a special club. It’s about having shared assumptions.

>>11240706
The Butler sentence above is a case in point.

Maybe she takes too many shortcuts, or tries to pack too many of them into a single sentence. But anyone who's reading Diacritics should know these shortcuts. You need to know how to navigate a parallel syntactic structure. You need to have a basic understanding of the methods of structuralism and the concept of hegemony. You need to have a conceptual map that allows you to see how questions about time are implied by the concepts of contingency, "repetition, convergence, and rearticulation." And you need to have a general idea of Althusser's work. Without these shortcuts, it might seem obscure and you might get anxious. You wouldn't open up a physics journal and complain about the incomprehensibility of the equations. Don't open up Diacritics and expect a piece of writing addressed to the general public.

Basically, this sentence is not a “garbled mess” to the public of Diacritics. It’s still a difficult sentence, and isolating it from its context probably makes it even more difficult.

This doesn’t even begin to touch on the question of why it would be valuable to teach this kind of writing, though. Michael Warner, for one, thinks that Butler and Adorno use difficult writing politically, to depart from “common sense” and to address a public that doesn’t exist yet. Not enough space to go into that now, and probably irrelevant. /derail

>>11241211

See I understand what you're saying, but in the case of the Butler sentence, I totally disagree. The sentence, at its core, is a mess. I'm talking about the structure of the sentence upon which she built all of academic references. If you strip away all of the asides, parentheticals, adjective phrases, etc. you're left with a pretty awful sentence:

The move (noun)... brought (verb) the question (object)... into the thinking (object), and marked (verb) a shift (object) from a form... to [another form] in which the insights (noun)... inaugurate (verb) a... conception (object) as bound up with... sites and strategies.

I'm going to rewrite that without notation for clairty. At its core, this is the sentence:

>The move brought the question into the thinking, and marked a shift from a form to [another form] in which the insights inaugurate a conception as bound up with sites and strategies.

There is not a single goddamned concrete noun in that entire fucking thing, for one. It's a run-on. She wrote it in passive voice.

Of course, being removed from context does not help, but that doesn't have much to do with the fact (well, not fact, but my opinion) that the sentence is barely functional at its foundation.

Aside from not trying to jam so much into such small space, Butler (and many theorists) could solve many of their problems by simply writing in the active voice and starting their sentences with concrete nouns.

I don't know who she is referring to here, who executed "The move," but let's say that it's some post-structuralist thinker or group of post-structuralist thinkers. If she simply wrote her shit like this:

Post-structuralist thinkers questioned how temporality might effect our conceptions of capital. They moved to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to change through repetition, convergence, and rearticulation--and away from a strictly structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations...

>>11241332

(continued)...

For clarity, almost nothing trumps the sentence format of [noun] [verb] [object]. The dog caught the frisbee. The post structuralist thinker questioned the effects of temporality. Your mom sucked my cock. etc.

You can add any amount of layered reference, paralellism, jargon, whatever. But at the end of the day, your sentence will still make sense and have a clear, logical, and straightforward syntax.

An aside: I don't really care for Charles Bukowski. I think he was a mediocre poet and a toxic person. But he did once say one thing that stuck with me. It was something like: Writers today cannot even write a simple sentence like "The dog crossed the street."

I find that to be true all too often.

>>11241332
>>11241353
Your point's fair but you're overstating how much of a problem it is. Butler isn't a writer, she's a theorist. It might be nice if she wrote like a physicist but she doesn't, and she probably has good reason for it. There's a lot of possible motivations for a theorist's design of their style, aesthetic or political.

Hack students misunderstanding it doesn't matter. They'd remain hacks regardless. That they took the style at face value suggests they did the same with content. Obscurantism might help hide the fact they're hacks for awhile, but I really doubt it works well enough to cause any damage to the field.

It's just something that's the most striking to outsiders of the field. They love to reference the Sokal hoax towards that end. That's toxic.

>>11236460
>art as self-expression
>no mention of 18th and 19th century art music

>>11242818
i'm not familiar with music history m8 i dont wanna talk out of my ass

>>11240878
>It's not sexy to read and understand clear writers. It's not exclusive. It doesn't make a student feel like they're part of a special intellectual club. We should, however, uphold clear writers as exemplars of good academic writing. Or something.

I think you're still othering people who choose to engage in these ideas and discussions. It seems like you're saying that since they don't write to you directly (as a lay-person) then they think themselves part of some club. It's simply a different interest and you can choose to engage in it, taking time and effort to try and understand lingo etc. You can also choose to think of them as a snobby lot who likes to flaunt their knowledge. Undoubtedly some are interested in showing off, but I don't think that's the majority.

It also seems to me like they think this dense style of writing is somewhat like an art. The density is the beauty >"the anxiety-inducing obscurity" being praised.

I can see this from personal experience in poetry. I enjoy work that takes time to understand. Maybe not going to the books to look up obscure references (that's fun too though), but simply generating a narrative for poetry that might have little to no narrative strand. I write in this style too, and I expect that people will either enjoy the sound of the piece and call it good, or they will want to look up different references, possibly just sit and try and draw connections within the poem to understand. You can think of it as "Oh look at that guy writing from on high" or you can just see a person pursuing an interest.

Clear communication is good, but I think you also need to understand the audience. >>11240706 This article was not written for the general consumer. It was written for people who actively engage in the content and who can understand more easily. At some point, if the information is strong enough or it gets popularized in some way, there will be more simple interpretations.

>>11243085

> It seems like you're saying that since they don't write to you directly (as a lay-person)

As far as philosophy is concerned, I'm not a lay-person in the sense of some rando who is unfamiliar with the field. I formally study in the field in an academic setting. I also just so happen to appreciate clarity.

>It also seems to me like they think this dense style of writing is somewhat like an art.

Then they should write novels or poetry. This brings up another issue I have with obscuritan leftist academics: I am a leftist, and so I am sympathetic to the stakes that cultural marxists and lit critics discuss -- the stakes are life and death, justice, equality, and representation. This shit is important and it is immediate.

I don't think it's good practice to claim those stakes and then intentionally bury your point behind inefficient language use. As the saying goes: You can't write a poem about the trees when the woods are full of police. Aint nobody got time for that shit in philosophy. There is a field of writing that is concerned with the aesthetic value of writing and reading as practices that hold some sort of creative energy in and of themselves -- it's called literature. If that's what you want to do, you should write literature.

>Clear communication is good, but I think you also need to understand the audience.

Well, I am the audience. I am not the "general consumer." I am simply aware of the fact that there are far more efficient and clear ways to write academic prose.

See:
>>11241332
>>11241353

Coincidentally, I also used to be a literature grad student. And I agree with your point about poetry. I don't think that point applies to philosophy, especially cultural criticism which claims any sort of immediacy.

>>11243150
Not that guy but if you dont mind me asking anon, how's working in academia going? I'm interested in doing the same thing (maybe philosophy or maybe not).

>>11243199

Honestly unless you truly love whatever field you want to go into, or unless you're going to a top rated program, I wouldn't recommend it.

Consider this: Every year, every university is looking to hire X amount of faculty (adjunct and tenure track). Simultaneously, every year, every university graduates Y amount of PhD students. In almost every case, Y > X. Each year there are many more fresh graduates than there are academic jobs for them. This creates an abysmally competitive environment even for the shittiest semester-contract adjunct jobs. So what about tenure track jobs? Unless you got your PhD from Stanford (or whatever the Stanford of your field is), forget about it.

Here is one example of adjunct pay: $4,000 per section per semester. So if you get hired on to teach 4 sections, and you get your contract renewed for a second semester, congratulations—you just made $32,000 pre-tax for a year's worth of hard work... And you have no guarantee of contract renewal! You're poor af!

Anyway. If you'd rather only do stuff related to your field every day, if it's the only thing you find rewarding, then it can still be worth it. But if there is literally any other career path you're interested in—please, please pursue that career path instead.

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>mfw when some bourgeois scum claim aesthetics w/o ideology

>>11244146
Lmfao calling anyone bourgeois as an insult is proof you're a simpleton.

>>11239672
>with a copy of the god delusion
Are you one of those "more philosophical knowledge brings you back to god!!!1" people?

>>11244167
well memed m'lord! XD

>>11244179
>implying any of those bollocks would be possible without a divine being

>>11238727
"which is, unfortunately, what a lot of aesthetic theory is, or at lest how it's presented" transcribing complex abstract ideas = run-on multiple-compound, multiple-parenthetical sentence construction. There's literally no other option, unless you want a poorly explained concept. In which case it would be more "obscure" due to the lack of explanation.

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>>11237577
>Honestly recommending a cardigan

>>11236517
holy shit you are so pretentious.fashion isnt over simplified at all, there are still deep and engaging shows every season. Maybe they fly over your head, but they are still there.

The only thing that has changed is how fast we cycle through reiterations of older stuff because the world is so connected now that we can sell and move faster. It is natural progression that has blended a lot of things for a pretty pleasing look most of the time.

>>11244189
>>11244189

I've addressed this here:
>>11241332
>>11241353

Also, when you say that it's necessary to write supremely complex sentences in order to convey complex ideas, you ignore the swaths of philosophers who deal with complex ideas very plainly.

In fact, I think even the most complex ideas are reducible to premises and conclusions. Perhaps the densest portions of the prose would be sections where you define the terms that you use in your syllogisms.

>>11244847
>>11241332

Your breakdown of the Butler sentence is convincing. It shows that, when stripped to its skeleton, the sentence is basically passive and abstract. Why is that a judgment of the sentence's intelligibility and not simply a description of its grammatical form?

My initial sense of the sentence's intelligibility came from a different breakdown, I think. Like this:

>The move from account S to view H ... marked a shift from form s to form h.

where S is "structuralist account of capital" and H "view of power relations using concept of hegemony." The lower-case letters -- s and h -- are more specific descriptions of the forms of theory used to produce those accounts.

But the sentence is severely impacted, so you get descriptions of S, H, s, and h in relative clauses (mostly the clause "in which”) rather than standalone sentences. It's also just sort of redundant. Like the "shift" just re-describes the "move" as a change of "form." What makes an "account" or "view" different from a "form “?

Although it might be exhausting to interrupt a critical discourse with what look like ground-rule questions, Butler has aesthetic and political reasons (as >>11241392 observes) for these stylistic choices. Outside observers generally strip the writing of that specificity. Compared to how “plain” English looks, this looks incomprehensible. Or it doesn’t measure up to what we already know to be good style. Maybe it’s not trying to. Maybe it’s trying to enact a possible form of writing / thinking rather than reproduce an explanatory style.

>>11244964
(cont'd) --

I am not entirely convinced that the journal article is an "appropriate" genre for formal experimentation. Sometimes you just want an abstract of an event in intellectual history. One that basically says "With the concept of hegemony, theorists brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure. This marked a shift from Althusserian theory's synchronic formalism to a new form of theory in which the contingent possibilities of structure -- how power relations might repeat, converge, and rearticulate themselves -- could be theorized ." Or something like that.

>>11243150
Your post here registers a similar hesitation about the appropriateness of Butler's assumed genre. (So does the Steven Pinker thing here -- >>11240729 -- but I don't care enough to get into that.)

If she wants to make her prose into a vehicle for experiments in form, why not just write within some nebulous genre called "literature"? Why call her work philosophy, or critical theory, if what she really wants to do is more akin to "creative writing"?

I am not confident that we can sort out genre in advance. And, again, that would seem to be consistent with the aesthetic and political thrust of Butler's style. It's enacting a genre, not reproducing one; or, more precisely, it's enacting a genre by repeating a genre differently (performativity 101).

Note, too, that the Butler sentence is from 1997. Academic prose has changed a lot in that time, as have the contours of public intellectualism. Butler's "Reflections" are on the "Conversations of [Her] Time," which are not necessarily in joint with ours. Deconstructive criticism, and the formalisms it made possible, for one thing, does not dominate the academy (at least in literary studies) the way it did in the 80s and 90s.

Re: "even the most complex ideas are reducible to premises and conclusions" -- reducible is the wrong word. "Translated" is better; it acknowledges loss (of texture, specificity, etc.)

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>>11244146
btw -- Abercrombie and Fitch is actually a good object for this thread

https://monoskop.org/images/d/db/A_and_F_Quarterly_Back_to_School_2003_The_Sex_Ed_Issue.pdf

O SHIT

>>11236408
or geoffrey b small or literally any artisanal avantgarde brand

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>>11245972
Artisinal avant-garde is becoming really derivative nowadays for a section of of the industry that is supposed to be pushing the boundaries forward. A large chunk just apes Altieri's old project