Ummm… after reading my own post it sounds as though I believe that in Science, writing is crystal clear, while in the arts writing is intentionally verbiose and ambiguous.  I wish that were true, because then at least scientific writing would be easy to understand.  Sadly, scientific journals have many examples of writing that is barely understandable even by fellow researchers.

I think ‘Hari’ is partially correct - I think that some people are nervous that they WILL be understood, and they their ideas aren’t ’sciencey’ enough, or too theoretically weak.  So they cloak their ideas in long words with ambiguous meanings, hoping that everyone will be a bit mystified.

It must be an effective strategy, because it’s all too evident in both the arts and the sciences.  

T.

Ok.  You probably won’t believe this, but it’s true:

Fredric Jameson, a Marxist (theortical standpoint) and one of the Big Cheeses on contemporary literary (and architectural)theory actually claims that clear communication is a problem in critical writing, since it opens the ideas up to reading/understanding by non-elite people. And by doing so the non-revolutionary and non-critical thining types have access to these ideas, and they can they appropriate, bastardise, what have you, the ideas.

I am honestly not making this up.  The guy is tenured at Princeton or soem sh*t makes 0,000 a year to produce ideas like this.  Reality has nothing on this guy.

Speaking of cool new multisyllabic words that get appropriated and bastardized by non-elite people, I was watching Iron Chef America a long time ago and one of the chefs presented something like a deconstructed sandwich, and according to a couple of dictionaries deconstruct was back-formed from deconstruction, which a lot of people seem to think is either dissection or deconstructionism (which I guess is equivalent to post-modernism for all their intents and purposes). So, realistically, I’m not so sure that Jameson has anything to worry about.

(And Hari, were you denied tenure somewhere? You seem bitter.)

Josh does make a strong point for justifiable pallet burning.

trent– no, never did a PhD etc, but I did do grad school (MA).  interesting fun experience, learned a ton, but oh my Lord, the jargon– insane.  it should indeed be loaded onto a j-tree post-send pallet and fired.  its funny; when culture-crit academics get together, they gossip.  they don’t talk about their work, which mostly involves really complex words for simple ideas. e.g.  JARGON: the inherent dialectic of romance promises the dissolution of hierarchical binary terms into the reconstructed whole of a hybridized, multi-faceted play of difference REAL ENGLISH: in chick flicks, you’re psyched that they get over their boy-girl arguments and have fun hooking up.