Thou shalt not write

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To a handful of fellow academics, undergraduates, former students, and aspiring intellectuals,

Please stop writing like Jacques Derrida. It is verbose, passé, boring, and painful. The hours I have spent reading articles that have somehow meandered into refereed journals and term papers that have flopped like a postmodern dying fish upon my desk are gone, and I shall never be able to recover them. Mumblings of ‘privileging masculine ontological concerns’ and ‘the hermeneutics of dialectic desituationism’ haunt my dreams. And don’t reply that I simply do not understand the point of the work, that this is mere post-modern ‘game-playing,’ that these little word games, full of sound and fury and signifying nothing, reveal the understanding of a relativist interpretation in which nothing in the humanities is more important than anything else. To put my reply to such insistences in a five-word word game / of my very own: bullshit!

Profundity is rarely expressed in such an inchoate manner, though there are profound ideas that must, by the quality and quantity of their erudite nature, require care in both expression and interpretation. The job of the writer in almost every instance, even the academic author who is writing to a specialized audience, is to be clear, vigorous, and intellectually challenging. Intentional obscurity regularly masks intellectual uncertainty, and often inanity. Peter Medawar, who was neither inane nor uncertain, once commented that
“a writer on structuralism …suggested that thoughts which are confused and tortuous by reason of their profundity are most appropriately expressed in prose that is deliberately unclear. What a preposterously silly idea.”

Silly indeed.
For great fun, visit: http://www.elsewhere.org/cgi-bin/postmodern/

for a new piece of, hmm, postmodernism at every visit. This site generates bullshit papers that are as deeply profound as the works of Derrida, as full of meaning and integrity, only more enjoyable to read.

Keywords for writing such drivel: transgress, Lacanian, semiotic, hegemony, feminist distopia, etc. etc. etc.