TCE Moodle Why you gotta go and make things so complicated?
I see a trend in academic articles: they want to complicate things. I always thought of complicated as negative. In fact, I remember a teacher comment from high school that my writing was too convoluted, but yet it seems that convoluted writing is now the fashion.
I wonder if our world has become more complicated simply because new media has merged so many different discourses and languages, and the accessibility of information has overloaded us with so much text that we are trying very hard to synthesize the globalized world and all of its complications. (Wow, that was one complicated sentence!)
Or, perhaps, it is one way academics display power in order to complicate knowledge so much as to make it inaccessible to the general public. I wonder if this esoteric talk is akin to a peacock fluffing his feathers: look at all my intricate colors and flashy form. Underneath, a peacock is just a peacock. We, as graduate students, are learning the jargon in our respective disciplines in order to fluff our feathers. We strive to complicate as well, but do we actually become more knowledgeable or more confused? In our efforts to emulate this ideal of complication, do we write with more conviction or more doubt? (The Plain English advocates are trying to move towards a more simple fashion of speaking, however).
On the other hand, I think that this trend of privileging complication over simplification could perhaps be an effort to get past binary thinking, that is, thinking in black and white. We are making an effort to say, well this may be right in this context, and this may be right here, and this may be right here, but wait, this is the rightest of the right in the most generalized context. That is just it, we feel we must come to a conclusion once and for all in each argument, which may just make the opposite of that declaration not right. Still, we want to admit nowadays that one theory is right, but... And the 'but' is important to keep the conversation open to new interpretations.
Here is an excerpt from John Searle (Speech Act Theorist) about Derrida, the most complicated writer I know. Prior to reading this, I had thought his writing was an extreme version of a French convention. But, if Foucault has called him out on practicing obscure terrorism, then I would have to agree.
“With Derrida, you can hardly misread him, because he’s so obscure. Every time you say, “He says so and so,” he always says, “You misunderstood me.” But if you try to figure out the correct interpretation, then that’s not so easy. I once said this to Michel Foucault, who was more hostile to Derrida even than I am, and Foucault said that Derrida practiced the method of obscurantisme terroriste (terrorism of obscurantism). We were speaking French. And I said, “What the hell do you mean by that?” And he said, “He writes so obscurely you can’t tell what he’s saying, that’s the obscurantism part, and then when you criticize him, he can always say, ‘You didn’t understand me; you’re an idiot.’ That’s the terrorism part.” And I like that. So I wrote an article about Derrida. I asked Michel if it was OK if I quoted that passage, and he said yes.”
Searle, John. “Reiterating the Differences: A Reply to Derrida,” Glyph 1 (1977): 198-208.
Nice read! I admit this article seems to possess been written having a certain type of academic careerism in mind, however academia is built upon some agreed values and practices, so following them is most likely the easiest method to succeed.
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Here are my informal writings from Teaching College English.