In which I stick my oar in someone else's blogfight
On the general subject of the validity of Johann Hari's critique of Zizek, the subject of much argumentation between "Unspeak" and "Butterflies and Sneers" (also). I think I might provide a service to the community by taking out my rusty old Welsh shovel and shifting away the heap of bullshit which has been piled up by the self-styled defenders of reason, on the general subject of the legitimacy of Johann Hari's critique Zizek and Derrida. To make this entirely clear, the burden of Steven Poole's argument is thus:
(ahum)
Johann Hari's essay on Zizek is objectionable because he clearly does not know what he is fucking talking about.
(thankyou)
Maybe he didn't read the book or maybe he read it and didn't understand it. What he didn't do is read it and understand it (unless of course, he is doing this on purpose as some sort of conceptual art project or something). That's an end to it. Steven is presumably too polite to say this in so many unminced words (journalists are notoriously reluctant to accuse one another of plagiarism or invention, for the same reason that the use of poison gas went out of fashion; it's a completely unpredictable weapon that can often dangerously rebound on the user[1]). But I'm not.
In related news, using the term "postmodernist" to refer lazily to Derrida, Zizek, Foucault and any other passing literary theorist or cultural critic is the very definition of "bad writing". It's actually a much more pernicious form of unclarity than simply posting up a massive great thicket of technical terms like Judith Butler sometimes does, because it leaves the reader believing that he has understood something when he is in fact just a little bit more ignorant than he was before he picked up the Independent. This kind of "bad writing" is probably both more widespread and more damaging to the general intellectual climate than anything that can successfully be traced to Grammatology. Perhaps I will start a snortingly funny "Bad Writing Award" for the most egregious example I see this year. If anyone wants to place bets (particularly if they want to place bets on someone other than Johann Hari), drop me a line.
[1] In a virtuouso display of irony, I plagiarised this joke.
1. Are you just talking about Bad Writing, Bad Writing in Newspapers or Bad Writing in Newspapers about Matters Intellectual? If the first category I would have thought any random pop music journalist would do and if the second I'd like to nominate Peter Preston.
ReplyDelete2. This posting provides another opportunity to invite people to enjoy Johann Hari's Wikipedia entry and speculate as to the identity of its author (my choice, Johann Hari).
Careful, you don't want the Hari thought police on your tail...
ReplyDeleteMost of the Independent comment writers are terrible though. I rarely manage to make it past the fourth paragraph of anything they publish.
Johann Hari's essay on Zizek is objectionable because he clearly does not know what he is fucking talking about.
ReplyDeleteThat's about the size of it. Though his account of what's actually in the film (and what instead is in the 2003 New Yorker piece from which he has apparently culled anecdotes without attribution) is more peculiar than seems explicable by simple ignorance. (See my comment #98 on the original post, if you can bear it.)
Enjoyable as it is to watch poor Hari getting kicked, I've got a tiny bit more sympathy for him than you and Steven Poole have, just because I'm quite happy to say that a lot of stuff I haven't read is total bollocks, and that my reason for refusing to read it is that it is total bollocks. Of course there are easy cases, such as books called _The Healing Power of Crystals_ and the like. But books called _Darwinian Politics: The Evolutionary Origin of Freedom_ or _What's Left?: How Liberals Lost Their Way_ aren't too far behind. No doubt I miss out on some hidden gems, which I mistakenly judge to be bollocks. That's my loss. Take the case of Baudrillard. Steven Poole tells us that he was charming. He may have been, and had I been charmed I might have bought one of his books. But I'm not going to read his books, because, though I haven't read them I believe they are mostly full of nonsense. Maybe, like Edward Lear, some of Baudrillard's nonsense is fun. Well that's my loss.
ReplyDeleteAlso see
ReplyDeleteOh dear. To borrow our host's form of words:
ReplyDelete"Splintered Sunrise's essay on analytical philosophy [linked to by ejh in the above comment] is objectionable because he clearly does not know what he is fucking talking about."
You could presumably put the gentleman right in the comments box he provides for the purpose?
ReplyDeleteTo be fair, I had read several of Baudrillard's books before he got a chance to charm me in person.
ReplyDeleteBut Chris raises an important point: we all have to decide that vast swathes of human thought are probably bollocks, or we'd never get anything done. But these are largely in the way of private, time-saving judgments. If Chris kept to his Baudrillard-free diet yet still wrote a long piece in the New Statesman about how Baudrillard is bollocks, I'd probably write a snarky post about that too.
I think that Steven is about right here; if you're going to dismiss a big and popular field as bollocks and not learn anything about it, then the sensible thing to do is either keep quiet about it, or get very good at bluffing (regular readers will be painfully aware of which course I chose). I think there's a family resemblance here to the behaviour of atheists of the Dawkins/Dennett/Grayling school, who seem to spend vast amounts of time and effort telling us that they don't believe in God. And in turn (I meant to post this in a comment to Steven's kung fu post), there's a family resemblance to the kind of "hard" martial artist who took up jiujitsu or karate in order to protect themselves, but ends up taking far worse beatings and suffering far worse injuries every week in the course of their hobby than they could have reasonably expected to acquire in a lifetime.
ReplyDeleteI'd be most grateful if Chris would care to go into a little more depth about my lack of understanding of analytical philosophy. Btw, not that I want to argue from authority, but Richard Rorty holds a view very similar to mine, and he was a leading analytical philosopher for 25 years.
ReplyDeleteWell let's just say that your description of AP relies both on it sticking quite closely to something like Carnap's programme AND (to make the insularity point) on its being a realistic description of what most anglophone philosophers do. But most anglophone philosophers do not stick closely to that programme, the question of "science as a model" is immensely controversial amongst them. (Rorty, sure, he's someone who has partly made his career by setting himself up against straw men of his own construction.) Who fits your stereotype? Bernard Williams? Myles Burneat? David Velleman? Jon Elster? Jerry Cohen? Rawls? John McDowell? None of those fit, even roughly.
ReplyDeleteI am grateful to Chris for coming back to me in some detail. His comments deserve a substantial response, so I'll turn this over in my mind and stick something up on the Sunrise in the near future.
ReplyDeleteI can's seem to find an email address for splinteredsunrise, otherwise I'd have put this in an email ....
ReplyDeleteWhen you are posting your riposte, you might want to take a look at a recent Leiter thread
http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2007/05/how_can_notre_d.html
(Especially the comments by Aaron Preston which reply to Leiter making a similar point to my own.)
There's a related Crooked Timber post
http://crookedtimber.org/2007/05/16/surely-in-need-of-much-more-argument/
with a further Leiter links in his first comment.
Sorry, the first parenthetical bit was ambiguous and misleading. Preston wasn't making a similar point to mine, he was replying to Leiter's similar point to the the one I made in this thread. (I'm suggesting that you'll find Preston's argument congenial.)
ReplyDeleteHow odd. I know for a fact I've sent Splintered Sunrise an email in the past. Mind you that was before their website changed location.
ReplyDelete