Is "Theory" BS?
Deliberate obscurity and potential fraud.
We should always be on the lookout for academic fraud. There is every incentive for fraud in the academy. Fraud is easier than real work. Fraud allows you to seem like you have new/exciting/profound ideas when you don’t.
Has fraud infected the humanities and social sciences? I can’t give an answer, because that would require a serious investigation.
But deliberate obscurity (“DO”) has definitely infected academia. DO is when you say stuff you know your audience won’t understand. In this paper, Bricmont and Sokal describe the “So brilliant!” reaction that not only tolerates but even rewards DO:
A friend of ours once gushed, after a famous visiting professor’s lecture: “X was absolutely brilliant. Of course, I didn’t understand a word of what he said.”
Consider the famous Sokal hoax in which Social Text published gibberish. There’s a crucial point about that hoax that doesn’t get nearly enough attention, namely that the journal that published the fake article was happy to engage in DO. As Bricmont and Sokal write:
Of course, one ought not conclude too much from that fact [that the paper was published] alone. All it proves directly is that the editors of one trendy journal felt comfortable publishing an article that they obviously didn’t understand. But what’s more striking—and was insufficiently stressed in the debate that followed—is that they published an article they could not expect their readers, nearly all of whom are non-scientists, to understand. This is an example of the deliberate use of obscurity.
Why would you ever include technical math/science concepts in an article for a lay audience? If you’re publishing for mathematicians/scientists, then that would make sense, but not if you’re publishing for a lay audience. Bricmont and Sokal suggest that the goal is to appear profound:
In the same way, we fail to see the advantage of invoking, even metaphorically, scientific concepts that one oneself understands only shakily when addressing a readership composed almost entirely of non-scientists. Might the goal be to pass off as profound a rather banal philosophical or sociological observation, by dressing it up in fancy scientific jargon?
Slavoj Zizek constantly engages in DO in front of his audiences. Zizek cannot possibly think that his audiences understand him much of the time. For example, does Zizek think that his audiences understand what the passage that opens this article means?
I assume that Zizek only engages in DO because he understands that his audiences have no problem with it. We have a culture that enables DO. People are OK with it, or even reward it with the “So brilliant!” response quoted above. Zizek engages in DO with impunity, just like a GOP politician lies with impunity, and the answer in both cases (regarding both Zizek and the GOP politician) is that you need to create consequences if you want the behavior to stop. How can we create those consequences, so that DO is considered a bad thing rather than something impressive that people will think is brilliant?
Noam Chomsky regards “theory” nonsense in academia as a nuisance in the First World and as a horror in the Third World. In the First World, these cults are just a nuisance. In the Third World, it’s horrific that these cults neutralize desperately-needed academics and remove these academics from popular activism. Chomsky makes clear that the effects are bad in every country, but particularly bad in poor countries:
It’s bad enough here. I don’t like it here. Or other rich countries. But when you get to Third-World countries it’s really grotesque. Because there the separation of the radical intelligentsia from popular struggle shows much more dramatically. People are much poorer. And they’re suffering much more. And these guys are usually pretty rich—very rich, in fact, often. And it’s ugly.
Chomsky notes an experience that he had in Egypt:
If you really feel, Look, it’s too hard to deal with real problems, there are lots of ways to avoid doing so. One of them is to go off on wild goose chases that don’t matter. Another is to get involved in academic cults that are very divorced from any reality and that provide a defense against dealing with the world as it actually is. There’s plenty of that going on, including in the left. I just saw some very depressing examples of it in my trip to Egypt a couple of weeks ago. I was there to talk on international affairs. There’s a very lively, civilized intellectual community, very courageous people who spent years in Nasser’s jails being practically tortured to death and came out struggling. Now throughout the Third World there’s a sense of great despair and hopelessness. The way it showed up there, in very educated circles with European connections, was to become totally immersed in the latest lunacies of Paris culture and to focus totally on those. For example, when I would give talks about current realities, even in research institutes dealing with strategic issues, participants wanted it to be translated into post-modern gibberish. For example, rather than have me talk about the details of what’s going on in U.S. policy or the Middle East, where they live, which is too grubby and uninteresting, they would like to know how does modem linguistics provide a new paradigm for discourse about international affairs that will supplant the post-structuralist text. That would really fascinate them. But not what do Israeli cabinet records show about internal planning. That’s really depressing.
Bricmont and Sokal point out consequences of DO that apply in the First World, right here in Canada/America, not just in Egypt:
Does academic obscurity have consequences beyond the ivory tower? We think it does. As George Orwell noted a half-century ago in his essay “Politics and the English Language”, the main advantage of writing clearly is that your mistakes will be immediately apparent to everyone, including to yourself. By contrast, obfuscation poisons intellectual life and strengthens the facile anti-intellectualism that is already all too widespread in the general public.
We are particularly distressed that these trends are often associated with the academic left. This link is weaker than right-wing ideologues like to claim, but it does exist. It’s perhaps not surprising that in periods of political discouragement, such as the present, parts of the left will retreat into mental masturbation. But deliberate obscurity is worse than a waste of time; it is also profoundly inimical to democratic ideals. Democracy presupposes discussion, and discussion presupposes clarity in the communication of ideas.
If intellectuals, particularly those on the left, wish to make a positive contribution to the evolution of society, they can do so above all by clarifying the prevailing ideas and by demystifying the dominant discourses, not by adding their own mystifications. A mode of thought does not become “critical” simply by attributing that label to itself, but by virtue of its content.
Decades ago, Chomsky requested that someone show him something from “theory” that was credible, intelligible, and unfamiliar. To my knowledge, Chomsky has never yet been sent anything from the world of “theory” that passes that test. It has to be credible. It has to be intelligible. It has to be unfamiliar. It’s a simple test.
Over the years, I’ve sent Chomsky many things from “theory” world. None of these things pass the test. This doesn’t mean that nothing could ever pass the test, but it’s not a good look for “theory” that this is so hard. I still have a 0% success-rate so far. Incidentally, Chomsky believes that the test might well be passable by something from Foucault or Derrida or others, so it’s not like Chomsky has no hope that the test could ever be passed.
Sometimes “theory” people won’t even attempt the test, which is striking. They’ll say, “You need to read Hegel and Husserl first.” That’s a bizarre response. People in math/science/philosophy are delighted to attempt the test if you ask them to. Why does every sector of the academy respond to this simple request with enthusiasm, whereas the “theory” people respond with tantrums/evasions/refusals? The “theory” people are the only ones in the academy who react like that.
Consider this enthusiasm, an enthusiasm that you’ll find throughout the academy in math/science/philosophy but that you won’t ever find in “theory” world. As Chomsky comments:
Again, I’ve lived for 50 years in these worlds, have done a fair amount of work of my own in fields called “philosophy” and “science,” as well as intellectual history, and have a fair amount of personal acquaintance with the intellectual culture in the sciences, humanities, social sciences, and the arts. That has left me with my own conclusions about intellectual life, which I won’t spell out. But for others, I would simply suggest that you ask those who tell you about the wonders of “theory” and “philosophy” to justify their claims—to do what people in physics, math, biology, linguistics, and other fields are happy to do when someone asks them, seriously, what are the principles of their theories, on what evidence are they based, what do they explain that wasn’t already obvious, etc. These are fair requests for anyone to make. If they can’t be met, then I’d suggest recourse to Hume’s advice in similar circumstances: to the flames.
Chomsky made some comments to me about International Relations (IR), and he gave me permission to publish these comments (this is a compilation of multiple emails—the stuff in square brackets is just additions to what he wrote, so don’t worry because zero of his words were removed):
Sure, I’ve read the “theory” and in fact knew some of the people, like Morgenthau. Our first meeting was amusing. It was a conference on Vietnam, in the mid-60s. We both criticized the war, but on different grounds: I criticized mainly on “realist” grounds, exploring the internal documentary record behind planning. He responded that all that is a waste of time. The war is morally rotten, that’s all that matters.
There are two main branches of IR “theory.” Idealism is the purest nonsense. “Realism” is fairly sensible (in some hands) as far as it goes, but is weakened by failure to pay attention to the internal structure and power relations in states and also to crucial international actors, notably transnational corporations. The rest is mostly truisms in polysyllables.
After we get rid of the very thin theoretical trappings, it becomes the kind of work I and others do, sometimes useful, sometimes much too ideological.
I thought it was a fine response. We agreed. It revealed that he wasn’t taking IR theory any more seriously than I did.
There are other examples. I’ve discussed the various stages of his thought in print, including his sharp shifts in the ’60s from a worshipper of America-Camelot with the zeal of super-Idealists to his virtually calling for a revolution to overthrow the corrupt American state, then back to the normal apologetics.
But throughout, the IR theory is mostly trappings—as he was honest enough to recognize, at least tacitly.
Physicists have theories and are respected, so if we want to be respected we have to have theories too.
For IR there’s at least a semblance of reality to it, though the theories are very thin and are constantly ignored by people who are serious about world affairs, like Morgenthau.
It becomes comical when we get to Pomo [Postmodern] posturing.
The fields are taken far more seriously, for perfectly obvious reasons. Try to expound QED [quantum electrodynamics] on Twitter.
Has nothing to do with IQ, or with intelligence, but with the depth of the fields. The conclusions of physicists about their fields have vastly more authority than the writings of IR specialists—like Morgenthau’s, to take one of the most serious of them.
The conclusions reached in their own fields are vastly more credible than those of IR specialists—[Morgenthau is] the one case I mentioned, since you brought him up, and he is indeed one of the more credible figures—and the conclusions [from Morgenthau] to which I referred are laughable.
And that’s IR. As Chomsky commented, once you get to “Pomo [Postmodern] posturing” it gets “comical”. Perhaps the craziest of all is Lacan. As Bricmont and Sokal observe:
Lacan’s defenders (as well as those of the other authors discussed here) tend to respond to these criticisms by resorting to a strategy that we shall call “neither/nor”: these writings should be evaluated neither as science, nor as philosophy, nor as poetry, nor … One is then faced with what could be called a “secular mysticism”: mysticism because the discourse aims at producing mental effects that are not purely aesthetic, but without addressing itself to reason; secular because the cultural references (Kant, Hegel, Marx, Freud, mathematics, contemporary literature … ) have nothing to do with traditional religions and are attractive to the modem reader. Furthermore, Lacan’s writings became, over time, increasingly cryptic—a characteristic common to many sacred texts—by combining plays on words with fractured syntax; and they served as a basis for the reverent exegesis undertaken by his disciples. One may then wonder whether we are not, after all, dealing with a new religion.
We should shine sunlight on “theory” and expose whatever fraud goes on behind the DO. Humorous as all this may be, the consequences may well be horrific in the Third World and may well be serious even in the First World.
Clarification: To avoid potential confusion, keep in mind that NC opposed the war:
On “realist” (in quotes) grounds but without any reference to IR theory.
What I just quoted is NC’s own clarification that he sent to me.