[W]riting that is arcane to the point of incomprehensibility is very much part of radical post-structuralism. Style, according to radical post-structuralism, is political. Post-structuralist writers tend to cultivate a style that excludes the vast majority of potential readers, reduces most of even the highly educated to a passive audience, and invites at best a small circle of initiates to discussion. This is not a matter of objecting to the use of technical terms that are not part of everyday language. Post-structuralist writing more often aims to confuse than to clarify or explain. Some post-structuralist writing rests on idiosyncratic vocabularies; much of it is written in jargon that could be translated into clear English relatively easily. Probably most of those who write in this jargon do not write with the conscious intention of bewildering or intimidating their audience. The style is absorbed with the ideology, and has become an integral part of the discourse.

Post-Structuralism As Subculture, Barbara Epstein (via beetx) (via curate)

(Semi-coherent rant) I think that the version of poststructuralism offered in this essay—and its endless collapsing of poststructuralism with postmodernism in order to allow the critique of the latter to stand in for the former—is more or less a straw man. Poststructuralism is alternately everywhere and nowhere—at once reduced to a “subculture” or “refuge” and inflated to the threat of an emergent “hegemony” within the liberal arts.

By making it clear that the battle being played out here is between Marxism and poststructuralism, the impulse seems to be to neutralize poststructuralism by emptying it of content and reducing it to style, or to a set of normative attitudes.

“much of it is written in jargon that could be translated into clear English relatively easily.” When has it ever been clear what “clear English” is? And when has the idea of clear English been outside of ideology? Is it the academic intellectual’s primary role to “clarify or explain”? Who is privileged enough to write what will look and feel like “clear English”? Who is privileged enough to expect that what they read will give a clear explanation of political realities?