Stuff and Nonsense

Read through my thesis draft today, making copious scribbly notes all over it about things to change. Worst bit: realizing my intro section is an example of the kind of academic writing that I hate. Filled with jargon, poorly structured, obfuscatory and exclusive – the opposite of communication. The rest of it wasn’t so bad, but that first chapter was suffering. Too many word-processing passes over it to amend this and make that more precise, and it had lost whatever shape it once had. I need to take it apart and reassemble it I think, if I want to be proud to put my name to it.
It was John Ralston Saul in Voltaire’s Bastards who really made the case in a way that convinced me – that expertise in modern society is used as a tool for power and is bound up with developing an exclusive vocabulary that is then used to keep out outsiders. I don’t know that I buy the agency implicit in his argument, but I certainly buy the end result he notes, of knowledge being caught up in silos and unable to serve as a check on itself across disciplines, of the reification of knowledge divorced from reality, and the cult of expertise that results being deployed as a rationale for persisting with insanity in the face of abundant evidence to the contrary. (Witness: the economy, around the world, right now.)
Actually, that brings to mind a great bit in the Boston Globe on the rise of the economist blogosphere, populated by highly educated experts who don’t buy the orthodoxy and who have been providing running criticism as recent events have unfolded. Go see the article, it’s pacey and insightful. Particularly go see if you’re one of those people that publish books about how the internet dumbs people down and blogs are a fad or a negative-sum game.
Anyway. Thesis. Continues. Yes.
Also: I am troubled by the precedent set in this, not least because sexually explicit parodies of popular cartoon/comic characters are a hallowed tradition.
And in today’s DomPost, prime spot on the features page yet again goes to a climate change sceptic. Tim Pankhurst, get your newspaper under control already! This is humiliating! If I had to pay for it, I’d never read it!