Yesterday, Maddy wrote about the almost unimaginable badness of much academic writing, noting that “the road to obscurity is paved with jargon.” In my previous work as an editor of volumes of academic essays, I encountered more leaden nonsense than I care to remember.
This trend toward obscurity has been going on a long time, ever since poststructuralism, imported from Europe, took hold of the American university. To give the reader a taste, here’s a passage, chosen almost at random, from Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices, by Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan, published by a university press in 1994. I quote at length (citations omitted), as the buildup of repetitive assertions and abstractions and jargon words is part of the, er, charm:
Postmodernism cannot be dismissed simply as the apolitical celebration of Western popular culture. Rather, it can be read as part of the operations of transnational culture; as the cultural expression of what Inderpal Grewal describes as “scattered hegemonies,” which are the effects of mobile capital as well as the multiple subjectivities that replace the European unitary subject. Such a conception of postmodernity both gives rise to formations such as syncretism and hybridity in contemporary mass culture and makes possible a critique of cultural relativism. For postmodern articulations of difference and global connections can be used to reify dominant social relations, or they can be used to oppose the hegemony of Western imperial culture. That is, articulations of hybridity can be read to argue that Western Culture is not pure, is the origin or the destination of everything. Yet, what seems to get theorized in the West as “hybridity” remains enmeshed in the gaze of the West; Westerners see themselves alone as the ones that sort, differentiate, travel among, and become attached or attracted to the communities constituted by diasporas of human beings and the trade of commodities. . . . Syncretism in this neo-imperialist mode is signaled by the anomalous spread of things Western in supposedly non-Western locations. . . .
Critiques of postmodernity can map the distinction between “hybrid” and “non-hybrid” as related instances in a Western hegemonic discourse of culture that constructs centers and margins in an ongoing effort to create the diversified markets that limit discourses of multiplicity. While some Western cultural critics deny the subversive aspects of decentering, there are theorists in the “Third World” who continue to do so as well, attacking postmodernism as a purely Western “import.” [Nelly] Richard argues, however, that such a view on postmodernism’s “origin” ignores the multidirectional flow of culture that provides both hegemonic and counterhegemonic possibilities.