If you need Zizek’s points explained to you in plain language, then you will not see Zizek’s points even when they are explained in plain language. (That’s the model he’s using, to be clear; do I endorse it? Well, partly. It’s probably a bit less true than he might think, but more than true enough to be the proper approach.)
It isn’t arbitrary elitism that’s at work here; it’s that there are prerequisites for understanding! By analogy, imagine a mathematician who posts, on his blog, some equations. Other mathematicians who read his blog look at the equations, understand them to be making some point or other on some advanced mathematical point, and reply, there’s a discussion, etc. A lay reader then comments, asking—why don’t you say in plain language what you’re saying in this post?? Why the equations?
Well, because if the mathematician stated his points in plain language, then non-mathematicians would in any case not understand it, as it requires a deep background in advanced mathematics to comprehend. Oh, they could understand what he’s saying, but they in no way would be capable of understanding the truth of what he’s saying—understanding his points, following his logic, etc. So, instead, he is only talking to people who can grok what he’s saying, and to them, he can speak in equations.
P.S. I’ve found Zizek to be quite comprehensible sometimes.
I still don’t see how there is any benefit to be gained from speaking in a way that most people cannot even understand what you’re saying let alone “understand the truth of it”, as you put it. It seems trivially obvious that, if talking about something contentious or for which you are drawing a lot of criticism, doing both is pretty much always superior.
In your mathematician-postmodernist analogy, were the mathematician to face entire populations of otherwise intelligent, interested people claiming that he is saying nothing meaningful, it would be a relatively trivial matter to sit down for a few hours and break down his claims, filling in the blanks with “true enough” connections and sketching out what he’s trying to communicate in layman’s terms. Doing so would make his, and everyone else’s lives, better; if you cannot truly explain something then you can make it clear that at least there is something being explained here.
It’s therefore odd that pomo thinkers as a whole seem to have no desire to do so, and that people who try to do so take only a single step of simplification to go from totally unintelligible to trivially obvious (in contrast to mathematicians, who have a whole series of building blocks, abstractions and prior results to show the way through their proofs).
Maybe the ideas behind and insights of postmodern thinking really are irreducible in any meaningful way. But if so, it’s the only discipline I can think of to have such a barrier to discourse, and were I (or any well-meaning person) working in such an embattled field, I would surely take great pains to make that clear from the outset whenever talking about it to a lay audience. I would also be very careful to use a jargon that does not seem specifically designed to look like deliberately misleading, obfuscatory abuses of preexisting vocabulary...
Perhaps there is a “here’s a provocative puzzle; thinking about it will help you learn” teaching style going on, but if so, it doesn’t appear to be working very well, and it would be nice to see some other strategies being tried, if there is anything meaningful to be learnt here at all.
It was never my intention to defend “postmodernism”, or “postmodern thinking” as a class, only Slavoj Zizek in particular. To whatever extent others are similar to him, my points apply to them also; otherwise, they don’t.
As to the rest of your comment… consider that mathematics rarely has political implications, while the words of Zizek and others like him surely do have such. This provides both an additional incentive for many people to label his ideas as “meaningless” and to refuse or fail to understand them, and for him to decline to make his points too explicitly.
(There is also the point I made in my earlier comment, which I do not think you have really engaged with.)
Said did indeed explain why. At least in his model, the thing that he says Zizek is doing is using his explanations as a filter to attract the people who already understand what he means (or to further the understanding of the people who already understand 90%) and to shy away the people who do not understand what he is talking about. According to Said, his goal is not to educate, but to use his essays and talks as a way to build a following and a social group out of people who already largely agree with him.
Sorry, I don’t quite think I’ve gotten my point across very well, as it seems that you (and, I suppose, MrMind?) have misunderstood… I am not saying that Zizek is trying to build a following. (To build fame, notoriety, sure; but that is orthogonal to the whole filtering business.)
So bandwagonism isn’t a problem (for Zizek; for people who understand his points and are interested in discussing them with other like-minded folks, it is a problem… but constructing their own filters is left as an exercise for them).
Is Zizek’s goal to educate? Well, was the Buddha’s goal to educate? Laozi’s? etc. But if so, why did they occasionally speak in riddles? Why obfuscate? (Zizek is no Buddha or Laozi, of course, I’m only pointing out that this question can be put to any number of well-known and respected figures who are commonly understood to indeed have been aiming to educate people, in some sense, and are also generally considered to have been successful in doing so.)
(For more on this, see my response to MrMind, upthread.)
No, that I understood, but on one side, you cannot distinguish people who agree with you because they understand from people who simply agree with you because they want to jump on the bandwagon, and on the other side the purpose of the construction of this following is...?
Because… reason? Is there any valid point besides snobbery and fear of criticisms?
See my reply to habryka, below. Furthermore:
If you need Zizek’s points explained to you in plain language, then you will not see Zizek’s points even when they are explained in plain language. (That’s the model he’s using, to be clear; do I endorse it? Well, partly. It’s probably a bit less true than he might think, but more than true enough to be the proper approach.)
It isn’t arbitrary elitism that’s at work here; it’s that there are prerequisites for understanding! By analogy, imagine a mathematician who posts, on his blog, some equations. Other mathematicians who read his blog look at the equations, understand them to be making some point or other on some advanced mathematical point, and reply, there’s a discussion, etc. A lay reader then comments, asking—why don’t you say in plain language what you’re saying in this post?? Why the equations?
Well, because if the mathematician stated his points in plain language, then non-mathematicians would in any case not understand it, as it requires a deep background in advanced mathematics to comprehend. Oh, they could understand what he’s saying, but they in no way would be capable of understanding the truth of what he’s saying—understanding his points, following his logic, etc. So, instead, he is only talking to people who can grok what he’s saying, and to them, he can speak in equations.
P.S. I’ve found Zizek to be quite comprehensible sometimes.
I still don’t see how there is any benefit to be gained from speaking in a way that most people cannot even understand what you’re saying let alone “understand the truth of it”, as you put it. It seems trivially obvious that, if talking about something contentious or for which you are drawing a lot of criticism, doing both is pretty much always superior.
In your mathematician-postmodernist analogy, were the mathematician to face entire populations of otherwise intelligent, interested people claiming that he is saying nothing meaningful, it would be a relatively trivial matter to sit down for a few hours and break down his claims, filling in the blanks with “true enough” connections and sketching out what he’s trying to communicate in layman’s terms. Doing so would make his, and everyone else’s lives, better; if you cannot truly explain something then you can make it clear that at least there is something being explained here.
It’s therefore odd that pomo thinkers as a whole seem to have no desire to do so, and that people who try to do so take only a single step of simplification to go from totally unintelligible to trivially obvious (in contrast to mathematicians, who have a whole series of building blocks, abstractions and prior results to show the way through their proofs).
Maybe the ideas behind and insights of postmodern thinking really are irreducible in any meaningful way. But if so, it’s the only discipline I can think of to have such a barrier to discourse, and were I (or any well-meaning person) working in such an embattled field, I would surely take great pains to make that clear from the outset whenever talking about it to a lay audience. I would also be very careful to use a jargon that does not seem specifically designed to look like deliberately misleading, obfuscatory abuses of preexisting vocabulary...
Perhaps there is a “here’s a provocative puzzle; thinking about it will help you learn” teaching style going on, but if so, it doesn’t appear to be working very well, and it would be nice to see some other strategies being tried, if there is anything meaningful to be learnt here at all.
It was never my intention to defend “postmodernism”, or “postmodern thinking” as a class, only Slavoj Zizek in particular. To whatever extent others are similar to him, my points apply to them also; otherwise, they don’t.
As to the rest of your comment… consider that mathematics rarely has political implications, while the words of Zizek and others like him surely do have such. This provides both an additional incentive for many people to label his ideas as “meaningless” and to refuse or fail to understand them, and for him to decline to make his points too explicitly.
(There is also the point I made in my earlier comment, which I do not think you have really engaged with.)
Said did indeed explain why. At least in his model, the thing that he says Zizek is doing is using his explanations as a filter to attract the people who already understand what he means (or to further the understanding of the people who already understand 90%) and to shy away the people who do not understand what he is talking about. According to Said, his goal is not to educate, but to use his essays and talks as a way to build a following and a social group out of people who already largely agree with him.
Sorry, I don’t quite think I’ve gotten my point across very well, as it seems that you (and, I suppose, MrMind?) have misunderstood… I am not saying that Zizek is trying to build a following. (To build fame, notoriety, sure; but that is orthogonal to the whole filtering business.)
So bandwagonism isn’t a problem (for Zizek; for people who understand his points and are interested in discussing them with other like-minded folks, it is a problem… but constructing their own filters is left as an exercise for them).
Is Zizek’s goal to educate? Well, was the Buddha’s goal to educate? Laozi’s? etc. But if so, why did they occasionally speak in riddles? Why obfuscate? (Zizek is no Buddha or Laozi, of course, I’m only pointing out that this question can be put to any number of well-known and respected figures who are commonly understood to indeed have been aiming to educate people, in some sense, and are also generally considered to have been successful in doing so.)
(For more on this, see my response to MrMind, upthread.)
Agree, I think my last sentence about building a following was unnecessary and confusing.
No, that I understood, but on one side, you cannot distinguish people who agree with you because they understand from people who simply agree with you because they want to jump on the bandwagon, and on the other side the purpose of the construction of this following is...?