Down with Bad Language.

Jacques Derrida died recently.

Never been very keen on academic obscurity myself. Two words I would like not to see any more are “heuristic” and “hermeneutics”, simply because every time I come across them I look them up, but, for the life of me, I can never remember what they mean from one occasion to the next. [ I'll grant a provisional pass to "hieratic". Maybe I suffer from h-word deficit.] Have you ever heard any of those words in conversation? If people like Bertrand Russell can be clear in what they are saying, I think the rest of us should pay attention to that virtue as well. Clarity is hard, but worth striving for, even if ambiguity is an inescapable companion. With many impenetrable writers I can't figure out whether they are trying to focus in on particular details of complex things, or point out that simple things are more complex than you thought.

The talisman of the 20C academic: obfuscation = profundity.
So here is my little light-hearted parody:

In Memoriam – Jacques Derrida.

Clarity? Derrida gets an F in that.

But of course, an "F" is both a symbol and a judgment, and cannot be understood fully outside the social context of the interpersonal, yet unstated, modification of relationships that are produced by our inter-generational memories and experiences of the significance of receiving (or bestowing) an F in earlier stages of life, in various different contexts, most of them entered into under compulsion, and all deeply judgmental, thereby intrinsically threatening the fragile sense of self; this situation (or "context"), of course, giving further power to the pressure to re-interpret ourselves as purely social beings; i.e. defined solely by being compared to others in our peer group in terms of common attributes, goals, characteristics and accomplishments, which inevitably renders unique individuality worthless in the process of self-assessment, as it lies outside the de facto normative range of characteristics. We are thus rendered without significant individual existence, and distrust our own authentic perceptions of both the world outside and the world of our inner conscious experience. Thus the mere presence of the written symbol "F" in a discourse inevitably brings in the culturally transmitted continuity of shame that has, throughout civilization, been intended as a motivator in the other, but only through the psychological failure of the F-inflicting self to recall the experience of shame, and thereby empathize with the experience of the F-receiving “self”, thus also failing to make a more insightful prediction of the actual existential outcome of the quasi-solipsistic encounter with the subjective experience of being the recipient of an "F". That effect will be one of psychological injury, weakening the capabilities for action, either physical or intellectual, initially within the internalized conceptual framework current at the time of the assault, and thus by extension within any ensuing discourse, much as physical injury does.

Or, to put it another way: Getting an F sucks.
©2004 AJM