How to Deconstruct Almost Anything, by a Software Engineer • Hacker News Board

Re: How to Deconstruct Almost Anything, by a Software Engineer

#61

Post by calibraxis » Tue, Jul 06, 2010, 3:44 PM UTC

michael_dorfman wrote: post #30

Arun2009 wrote: post #7

Here's Chomsky on the same issue: http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/chomsky-on-postmodernis... A quote: "It's entirely possible that I'm simply missing something, or that I just lack the intellectual capacity to understand the profundities that have been unearthed in the past 20 years or so by Paris intellectuals and their followers. I'm perfectly open-minded about it, and have been for years, when similar charges…

Again, they are simple and should be easy to answer, if there is an answer: if I'm missing something, then show me what it is, in terms I can understand. This is a patently unfair test. Without a doubt, someone with infinite patience could take the time to explain all this to Chomsky-- but the fact that he lacks the inclination to actually study Continental Philosophy, and there aren't any volunteers willing to take…

Did you read Chomsky's full response at the provided link, rather than just the quoted snippet? If you have, do you disagree with his comments on Derrida's Grammatology, on Foucault's work, or his general comments on the other works he's at least tried to read? It appears he at least did some due diligence, and took the time to speak with some of the authors.

Re: How to Deconstruct Almost Anything, by a Software Engineer

#62

Post by tptacek » Tue, Jul 06, 2010, 3:46 PM UTC

michael_dorfman wrote: post #54

tptacek wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's not commenting on the lack of available tutors; he's observing that masters of e.g. topology and quantum physics are capable of rendering their fields comprehensible, because of an internal structure, consistency, truth, etc that postmodernism might lack.

Comprehensible to whom? Masters of continental philosophy have no problem rendering their fields comprehensible to, say, graduate students in the field. Some (easier) texts are comprehensible to undergrads. Any "lack of an internal structure, consistency, truth" is imagined by Chomsky. Really.

John Searle, hardly an outsider, on Derrida:

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.

Re: How to Deconstruct Almost Anything, by a Software Engineer

#63

Post by gryan » Tue, Jul 06, 2010, 3:47 PM UTC

michael_dorfman wrote: post #53

shadowsun7 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And the pressure for greater clarity and simpler exposition is admirable, so far as it goes I agree with you that greater clarity is good, so long as it doesn't sacrifice truth, or accuracy. But the context here is that Continental Philosophy/Deconstruction/the Humanities do not seem to even consider the pursuit of clarity to be worth its while. It seems, in fact, to value verboseness and unclarity above all else.

Sorry, but that's really not true. In fact, much of the lack of clarity (to outsiders) comes from the desire to be concise, and not verbose. You may think that they are being purposely obscure, but I promise you, they are trying to be as clear as possible without sacrificing truth or accuracy, or nuance.

I don't know if anyone else is going to read down this far, but I have something to say. The argument that outsiders need to understand the jargon is a red herring against the ultimate point. Even if someone took the time to learn the jargon and find some intelligent thoughts, there is also language purposefully designed to be unintelligible in order to conceal an absence of honest thought - this is regardless of the jargon.

I can do it with jargon you already understand, for example,

The totality of the colour blue is the sum of all of the integrals from one meta-point to another meta-point, formed in to spherical husk that can be opened by neither being within or without.

Even though those words are all well-established with their meaning, they are nonsense when strung together.

Re: How to Deconstruct Almost Anything, by a Software Engineer

#64

Post by michael_dorfman » Tue, Jul 06, 2010, 4:10 PM UTC

gryan wrote: post #63

michael_dorfman wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, but that's really not true. In fact, much of the lack of clarity (to outsiders) comes from the desire to be concise, and not verbose. You may think that they are being purposely obscure, but I promise you, they are trying to be as clear as possible without sacrificing truth or accuracy, or nuance.

I don't know if anyone else is going to read down this far, but I have something to say. The argument that outsiders need to understand the jargon is a red herring against the ultimate point. Even if someone took the time to learn the jargon and find some intelligent thoughts, there is also language purposefully designed to be unintelligible in order to conceal an absence of honest thought - this is regardless of the…

The totality of the colour blue is the sum of all of the integrals from one meta-point to another meta-point, formed in to spherical husk that can be opened by neither being within or without. Even though those words are all well-established with their meaning, they are nonsense when strung together.

That's true. And if you can find me a sentence from Derrida that is similarly nonsense, I'll tip my cap to you.

Honestly: it's not "designed to be unintelligible in order to conceal an absence of honest thought."

Re: How to Deconstruct Almost Anything, by a Software Engineer

#65

Post by michael_dorfman » Tue, Jul 06, 2010, 4:19 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #62

michael_dorfman wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Comprehensible to whom? Masters of continental philosophy have no problem rendering their fields comprehensible to, say, graduate students in the field. Some (easier) texts are comprehensible to undergrads. Any "lack of an internal structure, consistency, truth" is imagined by Chomsky. Really.

John Searle, hardly an outsider, on Derrida: 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 obscu…

John Searle, hardly an outsider, on Derrida

Ha! Searle is worse than an outsider--he's an outsider by choice.

Searle's misreadings of Derrida are laughable-- and then he has the balls to blame his sloppy reading on JD being obscure.

But don't take my word for it: read the essays in questions.

Derrida's "Signature Event Context" is a brief text, and not terribly difficult to read (if you have read Austin, as Searle has.)

Searle's reply, "Reiterating the Differences", is a disaster. Searle somehow got it in his head that Derrida was attacking Austin (which he was not), and wrote a "defense" of Austin that misreads Derrida atrociously. (Searle has since refused to allow his piece to be anthologized, so you have to hunt it down in the original publication. I have.)

Derrida rebutted with a piece called "Limited Inc a b c", which responds, patiently and at great length, to each of Searle's points. In fact, Derrida manages to quote every single sentence of Searle's piece within his own (which is not an accident, since the dispute is in large part about quotation and citationality in Austin.)

The two Derrida works, along with a precis of Searle's piece, and an interview on the subject, has been published as "Limited Inc", and is a great introduction to Derrida for those coming from the Anglo-American philosophical tradition.

Searle comes out of the debate looking foolish beyond belief, in my opinion.

Re: How to Deconstruct Almost Anything, by a Software Engineer

#66

Post by michael_dorfman » Tue, Jul 06, 2010, 4:20 PM UTC

cullenking wrote: post #59

michael_dorfman wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First of all: who called it "scientific thought"? I'm sorry that my one-paragraph summary of Derrida's reading of the Phaedrus was not up to your high standards. Perhaps you would like to offer a one-paragraph summary of some other reading of the Phaedrus that you think rises above level 4?

I think the point is, who cares about a philosophical reading of Phaedrus? What does this do for society as a whole? Does this advance people towards a better understanding of life and nature? What does this do to raise living standards or promote equality for people who do not have it? I think this is the main portion of the debate: all this talk is nonsense in any bigger picture.

In that case, your argument isn't with Derrida or deconstruction, but with philosophy. That's a whole other discussion.

Re: How to Deconstruct Almost Anything, by a Software Engineer

#67

Post by jbooth » Tue, Jul 06, 2010, 4:22 PM UTC

michael_dorfman wrote: post #58

mistermann wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I should point out that the author here is completely wrong when he writes "Step 2 -- Decide what the text says. This can be whatever you want...." This is egregiously incorrect. In fact, one of Derrida's main points is that we do not decide at all what the text says. (As an aside, decidability is actually a term of art within deconstruction, so the author's abuse of it here is particularly irksome. If he had say "…

To me at least, it sounds like perhaps what you are talking about is legitimate, sincere deconstruction, whereas the author is talking (correctly, in my opinion) about an "evil twin" so to speak (ie: conservatives --> neo-conservatives). Perhaps I am; where does this evil twin reside? I am speaking of the work of Derrida, and the work of his followers that is (for the sake of simplicity) published by university press…

The evil twin is the John Locke quote above. Anything that consists of spending more time on your internal jargon, codes and scaffolding than on the insights that they produce.

About 70% of the humanities papers I've ever attempted to read had a much lower insight:word ratio than the newspaper. The humanities aren't fundamentally technical in the way physics is - they're always making subjective judgments, and everything's up for interpretation. So just say it, then, don't give me a bunch of stupid .25 cent word padding. I have a good vocabulary, I know those words, and I'm not impressed. If your idea can't be distilled to a simpler formulation than most of the crazy crap I saw in my friends' reading when I was an undergrad, you're probably not saying much of import.

PS your excellent summary above was a case of good writing. You could have made the same point using 4X as much words and a bunch of crazy but still-technically-grammatical-therefore-smart sentence structures, and that would have been the evil twin. Usually, when someone resorts to the silly-season writing, it's a good indicator that they don't actually have a point.

Re: How to Deconstruct Almost Anything, by a Software Engineer

#68

Post by muhfuhkuh » Tue, Jul 06, 2010, 4:43 PM UTC

cschwarm wrote: post #14

muhfuhkuh wrote: post #4

While I should just shrug it off and say "haha, you got us, we're certainly stuffy", look at the things we often are trying to discuss in Literature. Now, it's one thing to question the artistic merits of literature studied in academia, such as the almost impenetrable "Finnegan's Wake". It's not all because of its vernacular (I can't really read too much of it at a time because it blurs into almost gibberish after aw…

Sorry, but that does not make sense to me. A discipline either establishes common criteria to distinguish good stuff from bad stuff or it doesn't. And these should not be arbitrary otherwise the judgment remains subjective and therefore worthless. Since you admit that "there's alot of hacks", it seems literary criticism has no criteria or they are mostly subjective. Otherwise, you wouldn't have such a lot of hacks, b…

Oh, there is structure. Criticism comes in the following best practice, and you'll see this construct throughout most all litcrit (except for, you guessed it, the page-padding hacks who talk around the topic rather than about it):

1) Establish the "text" in question as well as the "context" of the text (certain themes, symbolism, diction, universality, etc.)

2) apply culturual congruity (whether you are applying the criticism to the time when the text was written or to modern times),

3) Establish your point of argument and/or analysis.

4) Apply argument to the text

5) Connect the evidence of this argument.

6) Conclusion

The fact that I use Bloom as a shining example of "good" criticism should steer you in the direction that there is quality there. His just one example of good work.

Is there an API to access Plato's Republic's quality hooks? No, but there are best practices. Just because you refuse to see them as common criteria doesn't diminish the task at hand. If you refuse to accept it as legitimate, you might as well refuse to accept there are such things as great literature and creation beyond the programmatic kind.

Re: How to Deconstruct Almost Anything, by a Software Engineer

#69

Post by decode » Tue, Jul 06, 2010, 5:05 PM UTC

michael_dorfman wrote: post #64

gryan wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know if anyone else is going to read down this far, but I have something to say. The argument that outsiders need to understand the jargon is a red herring against the ultimate point. Even if someone took the time to learn the jargon and find some intelligent thoughts, there is also language purposefully designed to be unintelligible in order to conceal an absence of honest thought - this is regardless of the…

The totality of the colour blue is the sum of all of the integrals from one meta-point to another meta-point, formed in to spherical husk that can be opened by neither being within or without. Even though those words are all well-established with their meaning, they are nonsense when strung together. That's true. And if you can find me a sentence from Derrida that is similarly nonsense, I'll tip my cap to you. Honest…

That seems like a fun game, though I don't have any opinions on Continental Philosophy. I don't speak French well enough to do it in the original, so I'll have to try in translation:

"And even if one wished to keep sonority on the side of the sensible and contingent signifier which would be strictly speaking impossible, since formal identities isolated within a sensible mass are already idealities that are not purely sensible, it would have to be admitted that the immediate and privileged unity which founds significance and the acts of language is the articulated unity of sound and sense within the phonic."

Taken from here: http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/f...

While reading it, I was honestly asking myself if there were major transcription errors from the original translation, because it's completely impenetrable.

Re: How to Deconstruct Almost Anything, by a Software Engineer

#70

Post by three14 » Tue, Jul 06, 2010, 5:15 PM UTC

michael_dorfman wrote: post #55

jcromartie wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is, I don't think that any amount of study lets you understand lit crit. It just lets you produce it and nod in agreement at other regurgitations.

Speaking as one who actually understands it, I don't know what makes you think you are qualified to claim otherwise. I don't understand a lot of high-level physics, but that doesn't lead me to imagine that physicists just sit around bullshitting each other all day.

That's spot on.

I don't understand a lot of high-level physics or Continental Philosophy, but the same process that leads me to believe that the physicists aren't sitting around BSing all day leads me to believe that the philosophers are.

(Which is to say, I read enough intro surface level articles that are supposed to give a hint of what you get into once you do begin to understand and talk to people about the same, and form an outsider's opinion. Same process, different results with the two fields.)