It's possible to discuss difficult subjects using plain, sinple language. Not everyone that writes sentences like that is a charlatan, but my instinct on encountering something like that is to ask: what is being concealed?
Because it's written for an audience of people who are very familiar with structuralism, Althusser, and the general development of Marxist philosophy over a 200 year period of time.
This is no different than a paper like "Attention is All You Need" expecting you to have a background in neural networks, recurrent neural networks specifically, neural-language models, and the transformer architecture.
It's strange to me that philosophy is presumed exempt from having technical language and expecting a prepared reader where nearly all other fields are not.
And that is the point.
> The move from a <FLOB> in which <FOO> is understood to structure <BAR> <similarly to BAZ> brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of <QUIN> that takes <QUUX> as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the <QUUZ> inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the <CORGE>.
Consider all the different ideas that are being referenced in just one sentence. There are only so many ideas I can hold in my mind at once, even if I'm familiar with them. Butler's ideas might be worth considering, or they might not, but writing like this is forcing a sort of labour upon the reader, regardless of whether they're familiar with the concepts used or not.
It is indeed tedious writing, but her audience isn't the general public, is other academics and people who get off with this sort of think and have read 100+ other books on the same subjects.
So, it's more like Dijkstra writing something to Knuth (and laying the technical language thick to save time), more than an O'Reilly book or a Hacker Noon post.
The point I was attempting to make was that even if you replace the variables with anything that results in an intelligible sentence, it's still going to be difficult to read. Regardless of whether you understand the terminology. The structure of the sentence itself is contributing to the difficulty in interpretation. Could time have been saved by writing it in this style? Sure, but it takes the readers' attention away from the actual argument and forces them to spend extra effort on interpreting the sentence structure.
I see this as a problem with academic (and even popular) writing in general. It's far from being exclusive to either Judith Butler or philosophy.
Lenin, Trotsky, Luxemburg, they are all quite clear.
Many modern marxists, like G.A. Cohen, write similarly clearly.
> Attention is All You Need
That paper actually defines quite a bit of what it is talking about. Nor are the sentences run-on or as dense in jargon as this.
I've actually read quite a bit of the "psychoanalysis"-inspired philosophy sub-genre inaugurated by Lacan. I think it is insulting to compare the jargon used in that context, where authors will often admit to be intentionally obscurant, with a technical paper like Attention is All You Need.
What's interesting about this comment is that Butler defines three terms explicitly in that sentence. The 'in which' can be read as 'defined as'
a structuralist account: capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to
etc.
> intentionally obscurant
Academic technical papers are also very frequently intentionally obscurant. That's part of academic writing, and certainty is itself worthy of critique.
> Nor are the sentences run-on or as dense in jargon as this
"In this section we compare various aspects of self-attention layers to the recurrent and convolutional layers commonly used for mapping one variable-length sequence of symbol representations(x1,...,xn)to another sequence of equal length(z1,...,zn), with xi,zi∈Rd, such as a hidden layer in a typical sequence transduction encoder or decoder."
Attention is All You Need is no different than the equivalent postmodernist text (this line of Butler's is certainly not the "Attention.." of the postmodernist theory world). Both are impossible to understand with one read, require lots of thought and study to understand and it typically helps to have someone else guide you through the text.
Some continental philosophers hide bad ideas or unclear thinking with obscure prose. But some analytic philosophers impose bad ideas and hide the lack of clarity in their thinking by rejecting whole areas of reality, experience, etc. from their examination, and then pretending the simplified model them came up with is great interpretation of the real world, the corners they cut are irrelevant, and so on.
Kind like the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spherical_cow thing.
>but this passage (from Judith Butler), for instance, is close-to-incomprehensible to me
Took it up as a challenge, and did 3 takes, the extended, the TL;DR; and the ELI18. Please tell me whether you like it :-)
Expanded version:
Some used to say that Capital (money/rich people/economic structures) influenced social relations to function in the same form [homologous] as Capital itself functions (that is, it turned social relations once mediated by nobleness, morals, religion, custom, etc. into economic relations/exchanges). [1]
Nowadays, we see that control over society [hegemony] works through power relations (relations between people with different levels of social power), that are subject to repetition [actions like marriage repeated as custom, versions of truth perpetuated through repetition in education and official historical accounts], convergence [many power holders -e.g. school, church, state, news, etc.- aligning and forcing the same ideas and thus establishing them] and rearticulation [power holders come up with new social norms, or articulate older ideas in new ways while continuing their lording over society aka "hegemony"].
In short, we had a static structural view that "Capital changes society in its image" and we now see that "Power relations change society in a dynamic way, through repetition, convergence, and rearticulation of ideas and social norms".
Both of those views are still answers about the question how power (in the old view, the Capital through the structural influence of economy on society, in the new view, hegemony, that is those with the upper hand in power relations - not necessarily just Capitalists, but also e.g. men over women, clergy over believers, the press over the public and so on) influence/run society.
This move, from the old way of seeing how power influences society to the new way makes us see that the way social structures are imposed changes over time (and is amenable to change).
This move, thus, marks a shift from the way Althusser considered structures as fossilized theoretical objects, to a new, dynamic way of seeing power over society [as contingent], and makes us see the shaping of social structures ("hegemony") as tied to different temporary strategies and positions as it constantly re-invents itself.
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TL;DR;
Capitalism doesn't just shape how we live [social structures] in its image, by making everything an economic exchange.
Rather, those having power in various domains (the "hegemony"), influence how we live through repetition, scratching each other's back and pushing to the same direction [convergence], and by inventing new BS to convince us what we should be doing (re-articulation).
This means the shaping of how we live is more dynamic than thought (also implied that this allows for more opportunities to change it).
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ELI18
Control is not just about money and capitalists making us their bitches and only caring about money, bro. The Man controls us by overflowing us with the same BS over and over, with getting along with others with power to fuck us over, and by coming up with new shit when we don't buy his previous BS anymore.
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[1] This is similar to Conway's law: "Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization's communication structure". It's also how Marx described Capital working: changing the world to its image, changing older ways people related - e.g. lord and peasant, husband and wife, etc. - to economic relations
I see many defending the "perfectly clear" meaning of continental philosophers, even if they don't obviously build up a clear argument from assumptions like a "10 year old" analytic philosopher might do.
Many, in my view, are forgetting just quite how obscurant many of these philosophers are. I am a little older than 10 years old now, but this passage (from Judith Butler), for instance, is close-to-incomprehensible to me
> The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.