Reign of Bullshit: Bourgeois Bullshit and academic capitalism
Academic Obscurantism: The deliberate use of needlessly difficult language in academic writing to make ideas seem deeper and more important while making criticism of those ideas more difficult.
We’ve seen how critiques of academic writing are customarily deflected, we’ve heard from prominent academics who accused their colleagues of using difficult writing styles to make their ideas more insightful-seeming and harder to criticize. We’ve established that even those best equipped to understand specialized academic language, academic specialists, disagree on what is necessary to communicate innovative ideas and what is self-aggrandizing word salad.
Since it’s almost impossible to prove anyone practices obscurantism unless they happen to admit it: We must turn to academia in general to see if the accusation makes sense. Since the claim is that academics are seeking prestige through needlessly difficult language, we have to examine how that would actually work.
One of the great fictions of academic writing is that it comes out of a lofty realm of independent thinkers seeking the truth for its own sake with little thought to the careerism and money-grubbing that define the rest of human society.
Obviously, individuals relate to their work in different ways and in academia, as in any field, there are some who seek advancement and others who seek to do the most good, while the majority sit somewhere amidst these extremes, and may even shift during the life of a career. Therefore, to get the broadest, most penetrating picture, we must examine psychological tendencies, cultural dynamics and material incentives in academia.
Psychology, culture and access to resources together explain much, if not most, collective human behavior. Psychological tendencies can be reinforced and selected for by institutions. Social dynamics calcify into cultural expectations that over time become cultural dynamics. Material incentives develop out of how institutions fund themselves, how they allocate those funds internally and how they promote activities that will best allow the university to not only continue funding itself, but to grow wealthier and more prestigious.
If this all seems abstract, it should become clearer when applied to what we know about academia.
Status comes from perception, and in academia specifically, from the perception of competence. Therefore, before one can gain material status, one’s work must be seen as competent, reflecting the competence of its creator. So, if the accusation is that academics needlessly complicate their writing to enhance their status, difficult-to-read writing must be seen as reflecting competence. But why would that be?
A possible explanation can be found in “the curse of knowledge.”1 The “curse,” is that the more you know about a topic, the harder it is to fully appreciate the gap between what you know and what your audience will understand. Insights that once blew our minds come to seem like banal common sense that can be skipped over, making it easy to confuse readers and listeners even without meaning to.
Therefore, deeply knowledgeable and insightful people may actually be harder to understand, even when they’re not trying to. The human mind seeks out patterns. If every time a rooster crows it starts to rain, we’ll come to associate rooster crowing with rain. Imagine someone in a basement, with no access to a window or the weather report and no way to see the outside world to verify the weather for themselves. But, for whatever strange reason, they can hear their neighbor’s rooster whenever it crows. It wouldn’t take much guile to realize that one could convince this basement dweller it was raining simply by playing the sound of a crowing rooster where the basement dweller would hear. Similarly, it may be that the “curse of knowledge,” causes academics and the general public to associate depth of knowledge and insight with difficult-to-read writing, which then turns a real psychological tendency and a real social dynamic into a cultural expectation. This cultural expectation can, in principle, then be imitated by those who want to add a bit of borrowed charisma to their work. You take ideas that may or may not be good and you dress them up in a way that resembles what people have come to expect when they’re in the presence of exceptionally brilliant thinkers and exceptionally brilliant thought.
This plays out in humbler provinces as well. We learn how to perform the roles we seek by observing those who already have them. So, those aspiring to be academics learn how to act, speak and write like academics by watching, hearing and reading academics.2 This process is reinforced by professors who have already been acculturated, and reward students who seem to be developing the professional language. These students are then more likely to go on and become professional academics, who then reinforce the same process through reading assignments and grading. In this way, even if a professor or advisor never actually castigates a student for writing “like a journalist;” simply by presenting examples from acculturated academic writers and rewarding those who sound like acculturated academic writers, they “teach,” students what being an academic “sounds like.” In this way, as it often does, what starts off as a natural or spontaneous social development gets turned into a cultural necessity.
But we’re not done. This creates a cultural context, an arena in which academic writing culture unfolds. What drives this culture to its extremes is economics. You won’t find a dissertation that starts: “I wrote this because I wanted to earn a doctorate so I could work as a professor, and they won’t give me one unless I can make a contribution to this field of knowledge, so, here it is, now I’m off to the job market.”
But surviving as an academic professional requires more than intellectual curiosity, some may ask if it even requires that. An increasingly tight job market with a shrinking number of tenure track positions has, unsurprisingly, increased competition for the positions that remain.3 What is surprising, at first, is that this market tightening continues even as the demand for higher education and the work of professors has never been higher.4 But when we stop thinking of universities as monasteries full of worshippers on the altar of knowledge, and start thinking of them as wealthy institutions that want to get wealthier; cutting labor costs and developing a submissive, precarious workforce makes perfect business sense. Tenure is the enemy of both, in this sense, it’s bad for business, hence the ever-tightening market for tenure track academic jobs.
The goal of any good capitalist enterprise is to get the most profit for the least investment. Gutting tenure goes a long way to balancing the “least investment,” part of the equation, but what about the “most profit?”
Many of the most prestigious universities have figured out that getting a high spot on university rankings is a reliable, predictable, and readily quantifiable way to attract students who will pay an ever increasing cost of attendance.5 Global rankings have become especially valuable, because they compare universities with their peers globally, and because of what they signal to the vast and ever-expanding market for international students.
The research done by individual faculty contributes to these rankings mostly through enhancing a university’s reputation, which is most readily measured through citation indexes.6 Citation indexes measure how many other books and papers cite an academic’s work. Even rankings that don’t use indexes have traditionally used reputation surveys to poll academics on which schools have the highest research reputations in their field. This amounts to a less rigorous version of the same thing. Researchers who get read and cited a lot have more prestige in their field, an institution that tends to have a lot of high-prestige people will therefore be seen as prestigious. So, to put it all together: The more cited an academic is, the more they contribute to a university’s ranking; the higher ranked a university is, the more selective it can be about who it admits because students are more likely to want to attend higher ranked universities; higher selectivity translates into higher ranking still, which allows the university to charge students more for admission, since higher ranked universities are seen by students as being a better investment. Being higher ranked also translates into more donor cash since it's more prestigious to be a major donor to a university the more elite that university is.
When one understands this basic dynamic, it makes perfect sense that some of America’s most highly ranked universities would offer “merit,” based annual pay increases determined in part by how many peer reviewed papers and books a professor writes and how widely cited they are. It’s all part of the “academic star system,” in which elite universities compete for “star,” academics to bring them prestige and citations, which translates into high rankings and cold hard cash always for the university, and often for the academic, either through merit pay or being one of the few highly marketable academic celebrities who can move wherever the best conditions beckon.7 Having secured such “stars,” to help attract the cash, universities are free to deploy a growing army of adjunct faculty to do most of the teaching students are paying for.
The well-known edict “publish or perish,” though it pre-dates the star system as a recognized phenomenon by decades, helps fuel it.8 They grow out of the same idea, that elite academic institutions don’t just teach students, they produce cutting edge research, therefore, professors must serve this mission by producing such research. There’s nothing wrong with this idea, but as it typically does, the capitalist drive for profit distorts it. Rather than simply encouraging professors to pursue cutting edge research, the sheer quantity of books and papers becomes a metric of academic excellence.
But quantity is just a stand-in for what university administrators really want: prestige. And in a world where it’s estimated that somewhere between 50-90% of articles go uncited, publishing is only the beginning of prestige.9 The humanities tend to be nearer the low end of this range, with up to 90% of humanities articles going uncited by some estimates. This is where academic obscurantism and the curse of knowledge come back into focus. If difficult prose is correlated with deep knowledge in the minds of students, researchers and the lay public, then one way to signal such knowledge, to signal that you’re not just another yeoman paid to think, but possess a mind of unique and penetrating power, would be to write such prose. Making your prose more difficult than necessary could signal, in an environment full of experts, and to the general public, that you know more or have more insightful thoughts than the average scholar, and that only the intellectually well-endowed can untangle your brilliant thoughts.
Being known for being so brilliant that only the most intelligent can decipher you would benefit those who cite you in a book or paper as well as those who quote you orally in a graduate seminar. Quoting someone known for being difficult to understand implies that you have the raw brain-power and determination required to understand them. Quoting such a writer, particularly when the quote contains a new word they’ve coined, gives you a share of their aura of erudition, it also tends to make your point less open to critique, because you’re quoting a writer “known,” for being “brilliant,” and because your own critics may be held back by the sneaking suspicion that they’ve failed to understand the “brilliant,” author you’ve so brilliantly quoted.
This makes both the writer themselves and those who quote or cite them difficult to critique, a valuable commodity in the hyper-critical competitive culture of academia, which increases the allure of quoting or citing such authors, which just increases the author’s own prestige. Finally, there is the fallacy of sunk-cost.10 Difficult prose makes difficult-to-read articles and difficult-to-read books. If one has spent hundreds of pages performing rhetorical brain surgery just to figure out what a writer is saying, it’s natural to treat this hard-won understanding as more valuable than insights that have been more easily come by.
Finally, the citational practices of the humanities and the social sciences, the most frequent objects of the charge of academic obscurantism, help ensure that a disproportionate share of the meager citational awards will go to more difficult-to-read writers. Research has shown that in the humanities, one major reason scholars cite others is to associate themselves with theoretical positions.11 Consequently, those whose writing is intellectually polemical, representing some major theoretical departure or the foundation of a school of thought, will be the most heavily cited.
Creating work that draws heavily on the work of philosophers who are already highly esteemed while making one’s work inexplicit and circuitous may be one way to make your work seem both authoritative and open-ended enough to be useful to other academics in search of a theoretical departure for their own work.
Theoretically, someone could come up with a framework that sounds like it’s saying something insightful in part through being so vaguely written that it’s hard to figure out if the author is saying anything at all. Throw in some new jargon and you’ve got an article, a book, an idea that can be cited any number of ways.
The social sciences have a related but distinct tendency. In general, the same dynamics that lead from the “curse of knowledge,” to obscure prose as a mark of academic rigor prevail. Depending on how one wants to situate one’s writing, one may draw on notoriously difficult to parse philosophers and their texts, or, one may attempt to emphasize the “science,” in your “social science,” through seeking a high level of methodological and statistical rigor, this, ironically, might lead to less precision in one’s prose, as research has shown that scientific writing has gotten more “inexplicit,” over time.12 This places the claim, discussed in part one, that the natural sciences never get critiqued for the writing styles of their practitioners, in a different light. It also adds an interesting dynamic to the infamous Sokal Affair. It may be that the curse of knowledge, combined with the ability to fall back on graphs and math, led to a culture where bad writing is tolerated in the natural sciences, if not expected. It may be that in seeking to imitate this idiom associated with “scientific rigor,” some humanists and social scientists take for themselves the worst possible example. Assuming, of course, that one is motivated by creating work for the public good, rather than by careerism.
The natural sciences give us another phenomenon that may contribute to difficult-to-read academic writing: salami slicing. Salami slicing refers to the notorious practice in the natural sciences of trying to get as many papers as possible out of a single line of research by identifying the “least publishable unit,” at every stage and turning it into an article.13 I haven’t found evidence that such a phenomenon has been observed in the humanities or social sciences, but certainly, if one wanted to publish the maximum number of books or articles with the least amount of work or insight, using ten words where two would do, and making those words as long as possible, with lots of lengthy digressions into far-flung philosophical provinces, would seem to be a useful skill.
To conclude, I want to be perfectly clear, while Conservatives and others may criticize leftist theorists for writing in convoluted ways in order to discredit these ideas, I have the opposite concern. My worry is not that bad ideas will infiltrate society behind a cloud of word salad, it’s that good ideas will fail to infiltrate because they’re hidden behind a cloud of word salad.
My concern is that because reading requires effort, because it is labor, the more good ideas are artificially hidden behind needlessly difficult prose, the harder it will be for the people who are directly impacted by the oppressive systems some academics claim to analyze to identify useful insights or dismiss muddled word salad meant to appear insightful.
I wrote these two essays to empower people: in the hope that better understanding of the conditions academics work under will allow seekers after knowledge to take a more deliberate approach to the work they encounter.
My point has not been to argue against engaging texts written in a difficult way, but to make more clear that ideas and their presentation are not identical. I’ve said it before and I’ll reiterate it here: A text can be challenging while also being written in perfectly clear language and in the simplest terms that accurately convey its meaning . A text can be written in language suited to 8th graders and still be challenging because of the assumptions it questions and the ideas it proposes.
An intellectually challenging text may be worth engaging even if it is written in needlessly difficult prose, but “needlessly,” is an important word here. In order to judge if a text is written in a needlessly complicated way, you first have to understand what the text is saying. If you can interpret what a paragraph or sentence says, then you can ask yourself whether the treasure was worth the hunt, whether the investment of time and mental effort was worth the insight, and you can ask yourself if reading a whole article or a whole book written in such a way is worth your time and mental energy.
If you can’t understand what you’re reading well enough to judge if the author is using needlessly convoluted language, why should you keep reading? It may be that more background knowledge is necessary, but this rarely, if ever, translates into page upon page of impenetrable jargon. You’re more likely to find frequent references to other theorists who it would also be useful to read, but if a work is so choked with references to other theorists that you can’t make sense of it, it’s possible, even likely, that what you’re reading is a hodgepodge of allusions designed to showcase the author’s erudition, even though most of what they’re saying has already been said by academic celebrities, which will have the side-effect of increasing the prestige of those celebrities by increasing their citation index scores and scores on reputational surveys. Understanding these dynamics, that academic work is produced in a web of careerism and capitalist competition, is useful as one tries to navigate this landscape.
There’s a lot to read and much to master if we are to understand this world well enough to change it. To do so, we must also make change within ourselves by freeing our honest curiosity from the empires of prestige and status academic capitalism has raised up, we must put away this brazen fiction that academics in their thinking and writing are floating brains intrepidly seeking out the truth, free from the petty craving for status and prosperity that motivate mere mortals.
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