4 ms·

The florid writing is an elitist fad; you can express the same idea in much simpler language without losing any meaning.

by ajkjk 4y ago

ly3xqhl8g9 4y ago
So what? Famously, Anna Karenina is about a woman who jumps in front of a train, why bother to read the other 863 pages. Anti-Oedipus [1] and especially A Thousand Plateaus [2] is about living in rarefied, futural spaces. Deleuze would be the first to be disgusted even at the faintest idea that his writing has any meaning whatsoever: you want meaning? go and live your life, don't read a book, especially not a philosophy book. In What is Philosophy? [3], Deleuze and Guattari give a very straight and simple answer: "philosophy is the art of forming, inventing and fabricating concepts"—that's it, nothing more, nothing less. Why would you hurry to admire a concept, instead of doing it repeatedly, now, tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow [4]: do you also not smell a flower because its florid and anyway you could synthesize ionones [5] into a vial, why bother with the flower. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Oedipus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Oedipus [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Thousand_Plateaus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Thousand_Plateaus [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_Philosophy%3F_(Deleuze_and_Guattari_book) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_Philosophy%3F_(Deleuze... [4] https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/56964/speech-tomorrow-and-tomorrow-and-tomorrow https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/56964/speech-tomorrow... [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ionone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ionone
- fasterik 4y ago
  There's a word for that, it's called "obscurantism". Profound and true ideas can always be put in simple language. See Richard Feynman for one example. When someone uses a lot of complicated words and sentences to make a trivial point, that's a red flag for me.
  - humanizersequel 4y ago
    >Profound and true ideas can always be put in simple language. Sure, you can reduce the passage above to "Chess is a game of specific, regimented roles, whereas Go is characterized an emergent, contingent understanding of purpose" — but you lose a lot of information compressing it like that, in the same way you lose a lot of information when you tell kids that black holes work like a bowling bowl on a trampoline. Sure, neither are incorrect at a phenomenological level, but it's such a reductive understanding that you can't accurately reason about it without reintroducing the "complicated words and sentences".
  - ly3xqhl8g9 4y ago
    Again, Deleuze would be offended if you thought any of his work has "profound and true ideas", for him (and Guattari), philosophy is simply not about "profound and true", he mocks endlessly all these people sick with "sign-ificance", every sign must mean some-thing. Also, accusing Deleuze of obscurantism is absolutely unfair and ignorant: Deleuze was truly one of the great teachers, those who can be pedagogical while keeping and increasing your interest in the topic, much akin to Feynman, in his works which disentangle the works of previous philosophers: Nietzsche and Philosophy (1962), Kant's Critical Philosophy (1963), Proust and Signs (1964), Bergsonism (1966), Spinoza: Practical Philosophy (1981), Foucault (1986), The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (1988). The aforementioned What Is Philosophy? is also extremely clearly written, and it is one of the best books ever to tackle in such a direct manner such a question. Also, accusing Deleuze of "complicated words for trivial points" is just ridiculously funny: it's like accusing Bach of composing too much music: couldn't he just sum up all the toccatas, fugues, partitas, and so on in one single massive beat drop.
    - fasterik 4y ago
      Bach is a perfect example of the kind of thing that I'm talking about, and he's as far from postmodernism as I can imagine. His music is simple and pure. It isn't trying to impress anyone with technical virtuosity or sentimentality.
    - encomiast 4y ago
      I disagree that Bach is simple (I'm not sure what pure means in this context). Bach wrote contrapuntal music. This means you can have two, three, four, or five independent voices that sum up to a whole while maintaining their individual lines. He also included techniques like inversions and retrogrades where the same lines occur backwards or upside down. And he included a great deal of symbolism and numerology in the music. The music is also, at times, very harmonically modern for his time. His music is often wildly virtuosic too — try playing the Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue — it is a showpiece. "Simple" is just the wrong word.
      - fasterik 4y ago
        "Pure" in this context means "without any extraneous and unnecessary elements". Google has a few different definitions for the word "simple". I don't mean it in the following ways: - easily understood or done; presenting no difficulty - composed of a single element; not compound I do mean it in the following ways: - used to emphasize the fundamental and straightforward nature of something - plain, basic, or uncomplicated in form, nature, or design; without much decoration or ornamentation - humble and unpretentious Keep in mind my comment was in the context of a discussion about postmodernism. I think that when compared with some of the more complex postmodern music, even the most virtuosic Bach pieces are simple. A couple examples: Finnissy - English Country Tunes - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O8VSRTl9tfw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O8VSRTl9tfw Ligeti - Etudes for Piano - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XHhZ2TzHlow https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XHhZ2TzHlow
- mcv 4y ago
  > Anna Karenina is about a woman who jumps in front of a train, why bother to read the other 863 pages. Spoilers! I hadn't read it yet.
humanizersequel 4y ago
People love to say this, but this is extremely dense writing riddled with technical language, written for people trained in reading it. You could perhaps eliminate some of the jargon, but in doing so you'd have to substitute a book's worth of less "florid" writing to get the same point across.
- ajkjk 4y ago
  "florid" as a word means "excessively complicated", not just "complicated". I'd describe this writing as florid because it its fanciness and complexity is obnoxious and unnecessary. Of course it's my opinion, but yeah, I think it's just bad writing, written to sound pretentious on purpose, doing a shit job of communicating its point because it wants to be inaccessible. You could easily write the same thing more clearly in no more space. I'm not arguing against beautiful writing or technical writing; I'm arguing against this thing that was pasted above, which is obnoxious, full-of-itself, not-at-all-beautiful writing.
  - humanizersequel 4y ago
    >You could easily write the same thing more clearly in no more space. I certainly couldn't, and I have spent a reasonable amount of time studying Nomadology (the text from which this passage is taken). Why don't you give it a shot? Put your money where your mouth is, let's say just the second paragraph, as that's the more serious offender in terms of jargon. I sincerely don't think you can rewrite it to be ~12 lines, forgoing all the technical jargon used, and retain all of the semantic content. Frankly, barring a demonstration of this task you could supposedly "easily" accomplish, it reads like you're just denigrating the writing because you can't understand it.
    - ly3xqhl8g9 4y ago
      Sure you could: "In chess pieces have identity and thus differentiated functions, in go they don't. At the level of state/war machine there are also functionaries: the president, the general, but also interchangeable parts: soldiers, workers." It just doesn't mean anything that you can summarize this or anything (Deleuze or not), you could even use a statistical learning tool to summarize it. You could summarize your deepest pain using just the words "it hurt", or your deepest pleasure with the banal, Owen-Wilson-esque interjection, "wow", so what? These people have just been mesmerized by Marcus Hutter and the like that "compression is intelligence", or by Richard Feynman and the like that things must be simple and explainable to a child: yes, maybe, if you write equations; no, if you are expressing love: philo-sophia. I just imagine reading their love letters: "Dear beloved, Today, as previously told, I love you also, Signed".

The florid writing is an elitist fad; you can express the same idea in much simpler language without losing any meaning.

by ajkjk 4y ago

The florid writing is an elitist fad; you can express the same idea in much simpler language without losing any meaning.

ly3xqhl8g9 4y ago

So what? Famously, Anna Karenina is about a woman who jumps in front of a train, why bother to read the other 863 pages. Anti-Oedipus [1] and especially A Thousand Plateaus [2] is about living in rarefied, futural spaces. Deleuze would be the first to be disgusted even at the faintest idea that his writing has any meaning whatsoever: you want meaning? go and live your life, don't read a book, especially not a philosophy book. In What is Philosophy? [3], Deleuze and Guattari give a very straight and simple answer: "philosophy is the art of forming, inventing and fabricating concepts"—that's it, nothing more, nothing less. Why would you hurry to admire a concept, instead of doing it repeatedly, now, tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow [4]: do you also not smell a flower because its florid and anyway you could synthesize ionones [5] into a vial, why bother with the flower. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Oedipus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Oedipus [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Thousand_Plateaus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Thousand_Plateaus [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_Philosophy%3F_(Deleuze_and_Guattari_book) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_Philosophy%3F_(Deleuze... [4] https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/56964/speech-tomorrow-and-tomorrow-and-tomorrow https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/56964/speech-tomorrow... [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ionone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ionone

fasterik 4y ago
There's a word for that, it's called "obscurantism". Profound and true ideas can always be put in simple language. See Richard Feynman for one example. When someone uses a lot of complicated words and sentences to make a trivial point, that's a red flag for me.
- humanizersequel 4y ago
  >Profound and true ideas can always be put in simple language. Sure, you can reduce the passage above to "Chess is a game of specific, regimented roles, whereas Go is characterized an emergent, contingent understanding of purpose" — but you lose a lot of information compressing it like that, in the same way you lose a lot of information when you tell kids that black holes work like a bowling bowl on a trampoline. Sure, neither are incorrect at a phenomenological level, but it's such a reductive understanding that you can't accurately reason about it without reintroducing the "complicated words and sentences".
- ly3xqhl8g9 4y ago
  Again, Deleuze would be offended if you thought any of his work has "profound and true ideas", for him (and Guattari), philosophy is simply not about "profound and true", he mocks endlessly all these people sick with "sign-ificance", every sign must mean some-thing. Also, accusing Deleuze of obscurantism is absolutely unfair and ignorant: Deleuze was truly one of the great teachers, those who can be pedagogical while keeping and increasing your interest in the topic, much akin to Feynman, in his works which disentangle the works of previous philosophers: Nietzsche and Philosophy (1962), Kant's Critical Philosophy (1963), Proust and Signs (1964), Bergsonism (1966), Spinoza: Practical Philosophy (1981), Foucault (1986), The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (1988). The aforementioned What Is Philosophy? is also extremely clearly written, and it is one of the best books ever to tackle in such a direct manner such a question. Also, accusing Deleuze of "complicated words for trivial points" is just ridiculously funny: it's like accusing Bach of composing too much music: couldn't he just sum up all the toccatas, fugues, partitas, and so on in one single massive beat drop.
  - fasterik 4y ago
    Bach is a perfect example of the kind of thing that I'm talking about, and he's as far from postmodernism as I can imagine. His music is simple and pure. It isn't trying to impress anyone with technical virtuosity or sentimentality.
  - encomiast 4y ago
    I disagree that Bach is simple (I'm not sure what pure means in this context). Bach wrote contrapuntal music. This means you can have two, three, four, or five independent voices that sum up to a whole while maintaining their individual lines. He also included techniques like inversions and retrogrades where the same lines occur backwards or upside down. And he included a great deal of symbolism and numerology in the music. The music is also, at times, very harmonically modern for his time. His music is often wildly virtuosic too — try playing the Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue — it is a showpiece. "Simple" is just the wrong word.
    - fasterik 4y ago
      "Pure" in this context means "without any extraneous and unnecessary elements". Google has a few different definitions for the word "simple". I don't mean it in the following ways: - easily understood or done; presenting no difficulty - composed of a single element; not compound I do mean it in the following ways: - used to emphasize the fundamental and straightforward nature of something - plain, basic, or uncomplicated in form, nature, or design; without much decoration or ornamentation - humble and unpretentious Keep in mind my comment was in the context of a discussion about postmodernism. I think that when compared with some of the more complex postmodern music, even the most virtuosic Bach pieces are simple. A couple examples: Finnissy - English Country Tunes - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O8VSRTl9tfw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O8VSRTl9tfw Ligeti - Etudes for Piano - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XHhZ2TzHlow https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XHhZ2TzHlow
mcv 4y ago
> Anna Karenina is about a woman who jumps in front of a train, why bother to read the other 863 pages. Spoilers! I hadn't read it yet.

humanizersequel 4y ago

People love to say this, but this is extremely dense writing riddled with technical language, written for people trained in reading it. You could perhaps eliminate some of the jargon, but in doing so you'd have to substitute a book's worth of less "florid" writing to get the same point across.

ajkjk 4y ago
"florid" as a word means "excessively complicated", not just "complicated". I'd describe this writing as florid because it its fanciness and complexity is obnoxious and unnecessary. Of course it's my opinion, but yeah, I think it's just bad writing, written to sound pretentious on purpose, doing a shit job of communicating its point because it wants to be inaccessible. You could easily write the same thing more clearly in no more space. I'm not arguing against beautiful writing or technical writing; I'm arguing against this thing that was pasted above, which is obnoxious, full-of-itself, not-at-all-beautiful writing.
- humanizersequel 4y ago
  >You could easily write the same thing more clearly in no more space. I certainly couldn't, and I have spent a reasonable amount of time studying Nomadology (the text from which this passage is taken). Why don't you give it a shot? Put your money where your mouth is, let's say just the second paragraph, as that's the more serious offender in terms of jargon. I sincerely don't think you can rewrite it to be ~12 lines, forgoing all the technical jargon used, and retain all of the semantic content. Frankly, barring a demonstration of this task you could supposedly "easily" accomplish, it reads like you're just denigrating the writing because you can't understand it.
  - ly3xqhl8g9 4y ago
    Sure you could: "In chess pieces have identity and thus differentiated functions, in go they don't. At the level of state/war machine there are also functionaries: the president, the general, but also interchangeable parts: soldiers, workers." It just doesn't mean anything that you can summarize this or anything (Deleuze or not), you could even use a statistical learning tool to summarize it. You could summarize your deepest pain using just the words "it hurt", or your deepest pleasure with the banal, Owen-Wilson-esque interjection, "wow", so what? These people have just been mesmerized by Marcus Hutter and the like that "compression is intelligence", or by Richard Feynman and the like that things must be simple and explainable to a child: yes, maybe, if you write equations; no, if you are expressing love: philo-sophia. I just imagine reading their love letters: "Dear beloved, Today, as previously told, I love you also, Signed".