Just being difficult?

Lately I have been engaged in studying Jonathan Culler’s Structuralist Poetics, a fascinating survey of the potential and problems of structuralist literary criticism. Structurawhat? Well, literary research conducted from the structuralist perspective aims to be, as Culler explains, ‘a poetics which strives to define the conditions of meaning’ (p. xiv), so that ‘the study of literature (…) would become an attempt to understand the conventions which make literature possible’ (p. xv).

See what I have to deal with to earn a living? Poor Fred…

Actually, it’s really not that bad. While Culler’s definitions of structuralism are not meant for a four year old, they’re not exactly inscrutable gobbledygook either. In fact, the man is a champion at explaining difficult thinking in simple words. Quite unlike many of his colleagues in literary theory who excel in using obscure language, sometimes malignantly to conceal poor thinking. Indeed, Culler even devoted a book to the subject, under the title Just being difficult? Academic Writing in the Public Arena, where he deals with branches of the academe which tend to indulge in an academic style that has once been described as ‘terrorist obscurantism’. Wikipedia mentions a famous example from the work of the feminist author Judith Butler, who in 1998 got a prize in a Bad Writing Competition for this sentence:

The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.

Yaiks. That’s bad.

So bad, it can even get funny; which is exactly what inspired the boys from this site http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo/. They decided to develop a software program called The Postmodernism Generator which randomly generates complete essays on postmodern issues, complete with quotations and footnotes. Each time you visit the site a different essay pops up. Five minutes ago, its title was ‘Debordist situation and postcapitalist cultural theory’ and the first paragraph read:

If one examines precultural narrative, one is faced with a choice: either reject postcapitalist cultural theory or conclude that art may be used to entrench capitalism. Derrida promotes the use of Debordist situation to challenge class divisions. Thus, an abundance of desituationisms concerning the modernist paradigm of reality may be discovered.

So for all you students out there, next time you need an essay quickly, you know where to look. And I’m very curious to find out whether your teacher will see through the hoax…