It's the Bourdieu thing about Marx not being a Marxist—ideological texts compress the world along 1 or 2 dimensions (e.g. power & class) not b/c the writer believes they're the only dimensions that matter, but b/c the writer believes they're causally underrated.
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Bourdieu calls it "twisting the stick in the mud the opposite direction," which is to say uh, "rhetoric." It's an -style corrective to the what's perceived as the dominant signal ideology, where words are prized for transformative effect over truth value
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And then the more diffuse but poignant graf which follows:
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Looks like a typical example of a person that has something insightful to say but expresses it in flowery, distracting look-at-me-prose instead of going for something more systematizing. Pity. I feel whole regions of understanding are locked away from me for this reason.
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I've wondered if this is part of the backlash to the failures of generalizing/systematizing in the modernist & structuralist movements. A lot of people are suspicious, I think, of anything that tries to abstract beyond the local.
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Yes, but why turn it into such prose-first texts? Is it that style substitutes for substance, or makes it harder to criticize? Or is it that the insights aren't all that mind-blowing because they can't be drawn very precisely or very far -
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- so they have to be dressed up? And fields become saturated with people who enjoy that game specifically?
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The steelmen I'd imagine are: prose beauty is an important end in itself; sem-vague thought-provocation can be more persuasive/generative for avg person than laying out framework; wariness about the accuracy/dangers of frameworking in 1st place; rhetorical persuasion via skill?
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I've felt similar skepticisms to yours about the ideology (while also maybe intuitively valuing prose beauty for its own sake more than you). Is it a kind of subterfuge? A pig in lipstick? The old joke about philosophy training just teaching you how to better defend yr bad ideas?
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how about this
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Often, an argument isn't long because it's intricate, but because it needs time to make itself comfortable within the reader's mind.
It's like
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Replying to @lumenphosphor
Requiring exegesis makes a text more transformational for the reader than straightforwardness
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Yes that's a factor, but also: deciphering it yields a sense of insight which you confuse for substantial insight. And treating a lot as not needing explanation feeds a sense of superiority in both reader and writer.
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Yes I have thought the same, but you can make it like that without obnoxious, self-important coquetting.
I guess I just don't like it.
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