More on Writing
From "How to Speak and Write Postmodern" by Stephen Katz, some advice on how to make your ideas sound appropriately postmodern. This was written in the mid-90s, so (fortunately) this style has fallen somewhat out of fashion in academic writing, but I still read enough shit that sounds like this to find this incredibly funny. Katz writes, Sometimes you might be in a hurry and won't have the time to muster even the minimum number of postmodern synonyms and neologisms needed to avoid public disgrace. Remember, saying the wrong thing is acceptable if you say it the right way. This brings me to a second important strategy in speaking postmodern, which is to use as many suffixes, prefixes, hyphens, slashes, underlinings and anything else your computer (an absolute must to write postmodern) can dish out. You can make a quick reference chart to avoid time delays. Make three columns. In column A put your prefixes; post-, hyper-, pre-, de-, dis-, re-, ex-, and counter-. In column B go your suffixes and related endings; -ism, -itis, -iality, -ation, -itivity, and -tricity. In column C add a series of well-respected names that make for impressive adjectives or schools of thought, for example, Barthes (Barthesian), Foucault (Foucauldian, Foucauldianism), Derrida (Derridean, Derrideanism).
He follows this advice with a paragraph-long example, describing how to use this technique to turn a simple sentence like "Contemporary buildings are alienating" into a truly obscure--and therefore acceptably postmodern--sentence like this: "Pre/post/spacialities of counter-architectural hyper-contemporaneity (re)commits us to an ambivalent recurrentiality of antisociality/seductivity, one enunciated in a de/gendered-Baudrillardian discourse of granulated subjectivity."
This is funny, as I indicated earlier, because there's truth to this. I've read too many books and articles that sound like this, wading through pages and pages of verbiage to finally figure out that they're not saying much of anything. It's enough to drive a girl crazy.
He follows this advice with a paragraph-long example, describing how to use this technique to turn a simple sentence like "Contemporary buildings are alienating" into a truly obscure--and therefore acceptably postmodern--sentence like this: "Pre/post/spacialities of counter-architectural hyper-contemporaneity (re)commits us to an ambivalent recurrentiality of antisociality/seductivity, one enunciated in a de/gendered-Baudrillardian discourse of granulated subjectivity."
This is funny, as I indicated earlier, because there's truth to this. I've read too many books and articles that sound like this, wading through pages and pages of verbiage to finally figure out that they're not saying much of anything. It's enough to drive a girl crazy.