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> is close-to-incomprehensible to me Because it's written for an audience of people who are very familiar with structuralism, Althusser, and the general develo

> is close-to-incomprehensible to me Because it's written for an audience of people who are very familiar with structuralism, Althusser, and the general development of Marxist philosophy over a 200 year period of time. This is no different than a paper like "Attention is All You Need" expecting you to have a background in neural networks, recurrent neural networks specifically, neural-language models, and the transformer architecture. It's strange to me that philosophy is presumed exempt from having technical language and expecting a prepared reader where nearly all other fields are not.

MockObject 6y ago
When I consider that sentence, except with all the technical terms replaced with ones with which I am well acquainted, it would still be quite a severe mouthful, begging to be rewritten for clarity. And that is the point.
whimsicalism 6y ago
> the general development of Marxist philosophy over a 200 year period of time. Lenin, Trotsky, Luxemburg, they are all quite clear. Many modern marxists, like G.A. Cohen, write similarly clearly. > Attention is All You Need That paper actually defines quite a bit of what it is talking about. Nor are the sentences run-on or as dense in jargon as this. I've actually read quite a bit of the "psychoanalysis"-inspired philosophy sub-genre inaugurated by Lacan. I think it is insulting to compare the jargon used in that context, where authors will often admit to be intentionally obscurant, with a technical paper like Attention is All You Need.
- baron_harkonnen 6y ago
  > That paper actually defines quite a bit What's interesting about this comment is that Butler defines three terms explicitly in that sentence. The 'in which' can be read as 'defined as' a structuralist account: capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to etc. > intentionally obscurant Academic technical papers are also very frequently intentionally obscurant. That's part of academic writing, and certainty is itself worthy of critique. > Nor are the sentences run-on or as dense in jargon as this "In this section we compare various aspects of self-attention layers to the recurrent and convolutional layers commonly used for mapping one variable-length sequence of symbol representations(x1,...,xn)to another sequence of equal length(z1,...,zn), with xi,zi∈Rd, such as a hidden layer in a typical sequence transduction encoder or decoder." Attention is All You Need is no different than the equivalent postmodernist text (this line of Butler's is certainly not the "Attention.." of the postmodernist theory world). Both are impossible to understand with one read, require lots of thought and study to understand and it typically helps to have someone else guide you through the text.
SummerlyMars 6y ago
It's still difficult to parse. If I replace the parts that I don't understand with variables, I get > The move from a <FLOB> in which <FOO> is understood to structure <BAR> <similarly to BAZ> brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of <QUIN> that takes <QUUX> as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the <QUUZ> inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the <CORGE>. Consider all the different ideas that are being referenced in just one sentence. There are only so many ideas I can hold in my mind at once, even if I'm familiar with them. Butler's ideas might be worth considering, or they might not, but writing like this is forcing a sort of labour upon the reader, regardless of whether they're familiar with the concepts used or not.
- boo_boo 6y ago
  If you don't understand "capital", you're probably punching above your weight anyway.
- coldtea 6y ago
  Check my interpretation above (I did 3 levels, expanded simplified, quite simplified, and explain-it-to-me-like-I'm-18). It is indeed tedious writing, but her audience isn't the general public, is other academics and people who get off with this sort of think and have read 100+ other books on the same subjects. So, it's more like Dijkstra writing something to Knuth (and laying the technical language thick to save time), more than an O'Reilly book or a Hacker Noon post.
  - SummerlyMars 6y ago
    Thank you for your translation. That helps to clear up the meaning, and was much clearer than the sentence in question. That said, I don't believe it invalidates my criticism, as it's not the technical language that I'm opposed to. Given your comment about it being tedious writing, I think we may actually be in agreement, and that I expressed myself poorly. The point I was attempting to make was that even if you replace the variables with anything that results in an intelligible sentence, it's still going to be difficult to read. Regardless of whether you understand the terminology. The structure of the sentence itself is contributing to the difficulty in interpretation. Could time have been saved by writing it in this style? Sure, but it takes the readers' attention away from the actual argument and forces them to spend extra effort on interpreting the sentence structure. I see this as a problem with academic (and even popular) writing in general. It's far from being exclusive to either Judith Butler or philosophy.
deleted 6y ago
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MockObject 6y ago

When I consider that sentence, except with all the technical terms replaced with ones with which I am well acquainted, it would still be quite a severe mouthful, begging to be rewritten for clarity. And that is the point.

whimsicalism 6y ago

> the general development of Marxist philosophy over a 200 year period of time. Lenin, Trotsky, Luxemburg, they are all quite clear. Many modern marxists, like G.A. Cohen, write similarly clearly. > Attention is All You Need That paper actually defines quite a bit of what it is talking about. Nor are the sentences run-on or as dense in jargon as this. I've actually read quite a bit of the "psychoanalysis"-inspired philosophy sub-genre inaugurated by Lacan. I think it is insulting to compare the jargon used in that context, where authors will often admit to be intentionally obscurant, with a technical paper like Attention is All You Need.

baron_harkonnen 6y ago
> That paper actually defines quite a bit What's interesting about this comment is that Butler defines three terms explicitly in that sentence. The 'in which' can be read as 'defined as' a structuralist account: capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to etc. > intentionally obscurant Academic technical papers are also very frequently intentionally obscurant. That's part of academic writing, and certainty is itself worthy of critique. > Nor are the sentences run-on or as dense in jargon as this "In this section we compare various aspects of self-attention layers to the recurrent and convolutional layers commonly used for mapping one variable-length sequence of symbol representations(x1,...,xn)to another sequence of equal length(z1,...,zn), with xi,zi∈Rd, such as a hidden layer in a typical sequence transduction encoder or decoder." Attention is All You Need is no different than the equivalent postmodernist text (this line of Butler's is certainly not the "Attention.." of the postmodernist theory world). Both are impossible to understand with one read, require lots of thought and study to understand and it typically helps to have someone else guide you through the text.

SummerlyMars 6y ago

It's still difficult to parse. If I replace the parts that I don't understand with variables, I get > The move from a <FLOB> in which <FOO> is understood to structure <BAR> <similarly to BAZ> brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of <QUIN> that takes <QUUX> as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the <QUUZ> inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the <CORGE>. Consider all the different ideas that are being referenced in just one sentence. There are only so many ideas I can hold in my mind at once, even if I'm familiar with them. Butler's ideas might be worth considering, or they might not, but writing like this is forcing a sort of labour upon the reader, regardless of whether they're familiar with the concepts used or not.

boo_boo 6y ago
If you don't understand "capital", you're probably punching above your weight anyway.
coldtea 6y ago
Check my interpretation above (I did 3 levels, expanded simplified, quite simplified, and explain-it-to-me-like-I'm-18). It is indeed tedious writing, but her audience isn't the general public, is other academics and people who get off with this sort of think and have read 100+ other books on the same subjects. So, it's more like Dijkstra writing something to Knuth (and laying the technical language thick to save time), more than an O'Reilly book or a Hacker Noon post.
- SummerlyMars 6y ago
  Thank you for your translation. That helps to clear up the meaning, and was much clearer than the sentence in question. That said, I don't believe it invalidates my criticism, as it's not the technical language that I'm opposed to. Given your comment about it being tedious writing, I think we may actually be in agreement, and that I expressed myself poorly. The point I was attempting to make was that even if you replace the variables with anything that results in an intelligible sentence, it's still going to be difficult to read. Regardless of whether you understand the terminology. The structure of the sentence itself is contributing to the difficulty in interpretation. Could time have been saved by writing it in this style? Sure, but it takes the readers' attention away from the actual argument and forces them to spend extra effort on interpreting the sentence structure. I see this as a problem with academic (and even popular) writing in general. It's far from being exclusive to either Judith Butler or philosophy.

deleted 6y ago

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