5 ms·
one of the surest signs that someone is full of it is that they have a long history of essays with no citations. PG's essays almost never cite anyone else's wor
by zemo 6y ago
one of the surest signs that someone is full of it is that they have a long history of essays with no citations. PG's essays almost never cite anyone else's work or act as continuations onto a line of thinking started by another person. PG wants to discredit the entire concept of academia because he knows that his work does not actually stand up to scrutiny.
hehe, curious (perhaps deliberate?) examples. This is maybe all very plainly obvious to you, but: Foucault's description of the panopticon, his description of discipline, and especially the continuation of this line of thinking by Deleuze's notion of _societies of control_ is extremely relevant for people who visit HN. How these topics relate to the work that most of the HN community does is explored very fully in Alexander Galloway's book "Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization" (here: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/protocol https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/protocol). Also I find it especially hilarious that the first "BS" word that he uses is hermeneutics; it's almost as if he's saying "you only have my permission to take my work at face value".
- dang 6y agoI think you misunderstand the genre of essay that pg practices. It's a form of thinking out loud, and intensely personal—a way of finding out how one understands oneself and the world by writing about it. This is actually the origin of the term 'essay', which means 'attempt' and is intrinsically informal. Citations would be out of place.
- iWorshipFAANGS 6y agoI'm going to post one more time, just because I think there's a bit of a misconception here. You're absolutely correct about the origin of the word "Essay." It comes from the French word "essais," meaning "test" or "attempt." The form as we know it was invented by Montaigne, whose essays are indeed informal and personal. They're also uniformly excellent, and I'd recommend them to anyone. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Essays_of_Montaigne https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Essays_of_Montaigne However, if you click on virtually any of the essays in the link above, you'll find an essay that is packed with references and quotations. Quotations are a form of direct citation. Sometimes Montaigne misquotes, but this was well before the information age, and he was often working off of memory, so I think we can excuse his lapses. However, if we are to use the origins of the essay as an example, I don't think we can say that the form necessarily resists citation.
- dang 6y agoI'm glad you brought up Montaigne; I was going to, but then realized that people would accuse me of comparing pg to the classics and get mad about that too. I think it's a bit of a stretch to compare informal quotes to "citations" in the modern sense. The point is that this is an informal, highly personal genre. There are people, as you probably know, who claim that Montaigne invented not only the essay, but the modern idea of a personal self by writing them. So to accuse pg of being too personal or self-referential in his essays is a misunderstanding. The way his writing gets under people's skin is certainly interesting though.
- iWorshipFAANGS 6y agoAlright, well said. Although I still don't agree that it'd be out of place to include citations in a personal essay, what you've said is fair too.
- zemo 6y agois your argument that he's a genre writer and his genre is his own cult of personality, and that his pieces should not be judged on the coherence of their arguments, because making strong arguments is not the point of his writing?
- dang 6y agoThat's pretty obviously not my argument.
- zemo 6y agomy argument is that PG's writing is weak specifically because he rejects dialectics. Your argument is essentially that he's writing in a genre that is not dialectic in nature. This is like if I said "I don't like this cookie because it is not sweet" and you said "the cookie is not sweet therefore your argument is invalid".