Friday, March 12, 2010

Q.E.D.

This speaks for itself. My Public Intellectual class has some amazing assignments.

me: so we had to do some "bad" writing for my public intellectual response today
here's mine
Phil: that sounds so fun
me: To say that the conversive and discursive habits of those garrisoned within the Ivory Tower are less than limpid (that is to say, in a word, equivocal) is a not manifold position which finds itself too often espoused by too large a segment of the populous at large. These so-called arbiters of some undefined "authority"(1) maintain that academes and intellectuals, particularly those in the American context, have become too subsumed (enslaved) in the culture that births academic writing that they have become overtly and unequivocally concerned with the form of the genre and have thus distanced themselves from any semblance of meaning.

What these pompous, self-appointed cultural critics (Warner and Wallace spring to mind) fail to understand in their supposed apotheosis of clarity is that the nature of intellectual discovery is an abstraction not always accessible to those who would care to fathom its depths. Rather, the complexity of the concepts and the fecundity of the discourse of those privileged enough to partake in the academy necessitate a certain level of abstruseness within the confines of the dialogue between academics.

(1) "Authority," as those primed in the basic levels of sociological academic discourse, is a problematic concept, which, in this author's opinion, should be stricken from both the academic lexicon as well as that of the vox populi. Its inclusion in this debate is reason enough to dismiss this argument, but I shall put aside this obvious weakness and amusement for the moment in service of my and my colleagues' amusement.
Phil: I want to shoot you
me: success!