I don’t consider myself to be a stupid person, but I have a rather difficult time reading all these extremely dense cultural theory texts. I’ve read a whole bunch of different stuff by different people and groups over the past few days. It’s like you really have to sit there and mine that shit in order to lift out maybe a handful of usable plain English passages.
While I like to dabble in arcane vocabulary at times, I really take issue with a lot of this academic type of writing which rests almost entirely around bizarre terms with extremely difficult to pin down meanings. I think its the sort of phenomenon where people get so deeply into a field of knowledge and its language and thought processes that they are no longer able to extricate themselves from it and communicate with real people. Like what are you really proving if the only people you can ever explain your ideas to are other professors and graduate students with pens up their asses? Hehe. Okay, maybe that last remark is a little harsh…
I think another big difficulty in this kind of writing is that so much of it was done before there were any concrete examples of how these things worked. There was a lack of metaphors to truly explain these things in straightforward terms. To use cultural theory terminology for a moment: they had created signifiers without having any signifieds to really point them at, so they just ended up remaining as these like nebulous weird conceptual frameworks. I think now that we have ubiquitous computing technology and related fields of knowledge, that a lot of this cultural theory stuff can be explained a lot more simply using those types of metaphors. I don’t see anybody really doing that effectively, but maybe I just haven’t been looking hard enough.
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