One can easily drown in the convoluted rhetoric that floods the academic world today. However, I have discovered a life raft in which we can stay afloat on the deluge of unintelligible and meaningless words and phrases called "deprogramming."
Deprogramming means dissecting and removing the buzzwords and buzzphrases that are not meant to illuminate but to obscure the truth through clever manipulation and polemical rhetoric. I also believe that the more we deploy words and phrases that need deprogramming -- words like "deconstruction," "hegemonic paradigms," "cultural discourses" and "diversity" come to mind immediately -- our ability to write well, think and communicate falls apart.
The first thing that suffers is our writing. Consider two examples of bad writing. The first comes from the English Majors Career Information Sheet: "By focusing on major theoretical schools of the twentieth-century -- such as structuralism, post-structuralism, feminism, Marxism, deconstruction, queer theory, psychoanalysis, and post-colonialism -- an English major learns how to integrate an array of demanding analytic paradigms."
Just before this, we are told, "A corollary set of intellectual skills developed in the Dartmouth English major is a knowing deployment of a sophisticated critical vocabulary."
The second is from University of Chicago Professor of English Homi K. Bhaba: "If, for a while, the ruse of desire is calculable for the uses of discipline soon the repetition of guilt, justification, pseudo-scientific theories, superstition, spurious authorities, and classifications can be seen as the desperate effort to 'normalize' formally the disturbance of a discourse of splitting that violates the rational, enlightened claims of its enunciatory modality."
Speech is only barely behind this turgid prose. We often invoke words that have no concrete meanings, pad them with pretentious diction and add verbal phrase instead of verbs. This has the net effect of creating sentences that sound intelligent (though incomprehensible), objective and symmetrical. We commonly now hear speeches delivered thusly: "This institution would like to emphasize its commitment to a diversity that challenges the discriminatory structures of domination in our society while reversing the societal silencing of marginalized ethnicities. This will have the effect of stopping the perpetuation of cultural and social norms that exclude, oppress and render entire lifestyles inoperative. The kind of intolerance explicit in these structures of domination will no longer shape the experience but become transmogrified by, the oppressed and marginalized."
The downfall of communication and reasoning are closely linked. As we begin to use abstract and vague words, without referring them back to concrete examples in everyday thinking, we run the risk of politicizing the ordinary. We see this principle at work everyday in our newspapers.
For example, Jimmy Carter writes in the New York Times that Yasser Arafat was elected "by democratic means" knowing that his audience automatically sympathizes with anything "democratic" without clarifying what that is. Chris Hedges, who visited the College in the spring, said, "Israel is a racist, fascist, imperialist state," knowing again that his audience would never condone racism, fascism or imperialism, without defining what these abstract concepts are.
What do all these passages have in common (besides their abject wretchedness)? Their staleness of imagery and their lack of precision. Either the writer and speaker cannot express himself clearly or he has stopped caring about his audience. The concrete melts like ice cream on a hot day into abstract ones and run out of the bottom of the cone of rationality.
These declines, of language, prose and reasoning reflect the flaws of academic theory. A fair amount of the terms we use can be traced back to postmodernists who in turn stole them from the 1960s French radical leftists: Derrida, Foucault and the gang.
American academics sucked their words and modes of thinking up to propel themselves through the confusing world of the post-sexual revolution anti-racist world, similar to the way jellyfish suck water into their vacuous bellies to propel them through the water. The phrases appropriated from that '70s American generation float like a wreckage through the academy today.
Our intellectual capitulation to these dogmas and our fear of questioning our hand-me-down liberalism has transformed reasoning and persuasion into a ventriloquist act. Instead of choosing carefully our words and phrases, we use prefabricated phrases and tack them to together like a toy plane. Dialogue and learning have floundered as a result.
