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I don’t totally disagree with your criticism of Debord or other French pomo obscurantists. But there is some irony to complain on a coding forum that someone us
by artfulhippo 7y ago
I don’t totally disagree with your criticism of Debord or other French pomo obscurantists. But there is some irony to complain on a coding forum that someone used language in a way that’s hard to appreciate without extensive experience in the field.
On the point of ambiguity in words, while the approach of STEM is to minimize it, in the messy world of liberal arts, ambiguity must be accepted; this is a significant message in postmodern thought, anyway.
- kiliantics 7y agoEven in STEM, there is tonnes of obscure jargon. Much of it also sounds like it could mean something you are familiar with. Think of all the words in theoretical physics: strings, worldsheets, bubble nucleation, or just plain energy and action. Yet no lay person could hope to follow along if reading one of the "seminal works". That is just the nature of specialisation. And there is often plenty of ambiguity in there too, despite the efforts to avoid it.
- Iv 7y agoI do appreciate art and ambiguity in literature or many culture endeavor. I'd have no qualm in Debord if he was saying he wrote a literary experiment. However, it claims to be philosophy, not an art performance. I am of the position that while you can (and should!) imbue philosophy into your art, you should not present ambiguous and undecipherable art as a piece of philosophy. I can make a sculpture that use integral calculus in the way it forms shape, but that would not be an appropriate way to present a theorem at a mathematics conference.