Why is it so hard-to-understand and dense?
I mean, you can read one or two sentences and really think about it just to "get it." And then have a kind-of epiphany like "Wow, that makes SO much sense, I never thought of it that way." And that's just a few sentences.
Also, a short concurrence of words can have so much (uncited) history, reference, and knowledge behind it. It's like you have to be part of some kind of secret society to really get what they're talking about.

I like the ideas, I just which I could understand some if it. (Although A LOT of it seems like common-sense fodder for me. e.g. "It is crucial to recognize that a medium not only frames or colours the 'message', but, when a 'message' is transferred from one medium to another, it is thereby fundamentally transformed." To which I have to say "duh." That was probably one of the only sentences I understood.)
Do people in the "intelligentsia" really think that fast?

Sorry for that. I just needed to vent.
I don't know if anyone even understands what I'm talking about.

I am trying to read this article which is supposed to be about electronic German band Kraftwerk. But it spend like three pages talkinag about "the voice" and all of this weird stuff.
I say it's postmodern because it makes a few references to Derrida and Zizek which are postmodern philosophers.

Well, when it finally talks about Kraftwerk it talks about some kind of political thing that was going on in Germany and something about irony and being subtle and subversive. I don't really get it. But it makes all of these references to what other people said about something or other (like every three sentences). I'm guessing this is what decosntruction is. Where I think you're supposed to take a topic and try to explain it away and what that topic is a product of, what was the stuff that was going on around it and inside of it that caused it to be what it is. I think that's what deconstruction is.

But I don't really know anything, so don't quote me on that.

For example?

Okay.
Let me just copy and paste a random paragraph:

"The psychoanalytic conception of the voice holds that, contrary to materialist or historicist
conceptions, voice exists as a marker of, or a fetishized substitute for, our imagination
of an Other’s subjectivity. This marker’s activity can sometimes be assimilated into our sense
of ‘ego cohesion’ but, when unassimilable to that cohesion, it is often the site of a psychic disturbance and can lead to an ‘erotics’ of the voice.12 The assimilable voice, one that does not
threaten our cohesion, works like a carrier of whole or ‘healthy’ subjectivity which is none the
less susceptible to the vicissitudes of an Other’s desire: Poizat terms this the objectified voice
– voice made figure of our desire (or, for the materialist, voice made object of consumption,
a point to which we shall return shortly). The unassimilable voice, by contrast, is invariably
a site of an uncanny identification (for Freud, ‘das Unheimliche’) likened by Lacan to Freud’s
‘partial’ objects – anus, breasts, faeces, phallus – termed the ‘voice object’, a site of jouissance
(and which Lacan would term an objet petit a). A similar approach can also be found implicitly
in Julia Kristeva’s work on abjection13 and the revolutionary in poetic language14 and,
more explicitly, in Kaja Silverman’s work15 and that of several exponents of the so-called
‘Ljubljana school’ of psychoanalysis: Slavoj Žižek, Mladen Dolar, Alenka Zupancˇic´, Renata
Salecl.16"

Mech:

That passage has null content for normal human beings, which appellation describes both thee and me, I believe. When you see stuff like this you have our permission to gently close the book or magazine and scream silently at the author, "What were you thinking?" I would also give you permission to use the offending material as toilet paper, but it's probably pretty scratchy.

That stuff is tripe, utter tripe. The people who write that shit are just showing off their abilities to string together lots of long words into complex sentences which are intended to have absolutely no meaning because the people doing the stringing have no real meaning in their lives. [/rant]

If you cannot understand something on the second reading, a further reading is only going to waste your time.

Yay! It's not that I'm dumb!

But actually I thought of this: " [...]voice exists as a marker of, or a fetishized substitute for, our imagination of an Other’s subjectivity."
as meaning that when you talk, you are doing so in relation to how you think the other person thinks. For example, you'll talk differently with your friends than you do with a teacher.

But that's nothing insightful, that's common sense. I guess I mistook finally deciphering something with something that was revolutionarily philosophical or something.

showing off their abilities to string together lots of long words into complex sentences

Totally. A lot of the sentences were very unnecessarily long, where i had to re-read it like 5 times.
e.g.- This is one sentence:
"To begin, we must acknowledge that, although scholars can certainly talk about ‘types’ of voice, from ‘head’ and ‘throat’ to ‘chest’, and we can clearly also talk about the use of the technical processes involved in the learning and management of the various styles of vocal production, the scholarly community none the less seems almost pathologically unwilling to address the question raised by this article: how does the sound of the voice itself mean, or, to put it another way, how does the sound of the voice impact upon, shape, or otherwise intervene in, the construction of meaning?"



But it really makes you think. Are there are people that actually understand this? Without having to read it several times. And if so, how do these people think?
Some of this kind of strange academic writing seems to have a lot of fodder which just describes everyday life as some extremely abstract and complex thing. (I think that's part of postmodern philosophy or something.) It's as though these people are aliens observing "regular humans" or something.
(Which is one of the reasons I'm drawn to it, it's a fun way to confuse your friends when just talking about simple things like talking. It like subverts everyday life.)

any subject has its jargon, and those familiar with the jargon will get more (immediately) from something written about that subject. philosophy is certainly no different.

Actually those quotes are from an article called "Vox Electronica: Nostalgia, Irony, and Cyborgian Vocalities in Kraftwerk's Radioaktivitat and Autobahn", so it's supposed to be more about music, yet it draws references from philosophy and psychology.
(The title should have tipped me off that it would be difficult, but I was desperate to get a magazine/journal resource for my research paper. At least I have some stuff from Rolling Stones...)

Well, it would be cool to be able to know enough about a subject to be able to understand something like this with something you have studied. Maybe I could be able to read something like this about business in the future if I go all the way to graduate school...

Yeah, I'm one of those people that wants to know everything, but doesn't know where to start (and doesn't start to begin with).

I understood it for the most part. To me, the problm lies with his style, he thinks fast and talks about to many subjects at once within the same sentence. That's all it is, the reason you most likely had to re-read all that is all the comma's. You would read the first part and he would start referring to somthing else, then somthing else, then go back to what he was talking about. He should of talked about that main subject and then just take a little more writing to explain the other he wanted to say. He's just lazy.

That passage has null content for normal human beings, which appellation describes both thee and me, I believe. When you see stuff like this you have our permission to gently close the book or magazine and scream silently at the author, "What were you thinking?" I would also give you permission to use the offending material as toilet paper, but it's probably pretty scratchy.

How lovely to be granted permission by thee. I've read a lot of bad writing, some of it postmodern, some modern, and other paleolithic. As eta said elsewhere in this thread, part of the immediate problem with specialist writing is an assumed context and a jargon. I am currently reading a book (E O Wilson, Insect Societies) and I must constantly stop and reread sentences, look at earlier definitions of words, etc. Zero content, I doubt it. Not my field of study? More likely. A lot of academic writing is turgid and unreadable: some of it has content and some of it does not. Part of being educated, whether in institutions or by one's self, is learning how to read and trying to determine if an author is being authentic or merely a con artist. And as we can see from the folks in DC, non-content bullshit is not merely the province of academic dudes writing something about Kraftwerk in their latest paper. It depends what kind of audience the proposed paper has: Rolling Stone articles might not satisfy your instructor. Which in turn might not get you the grade you desire. (Think of this as a life lesson: when you get to the real world, you'll often have tedious tasks to complete and be judged by incompetent managers.) If you think it's all bullshit, write a critique (or deconstruction) of the paper itself, but be prepared for an argument. Should be fun. If you don't find it fun, perhaps you've chosen the wrong class or field of study. Just my US$0.02.

[Edit: fixed book title]

I encourage you to check out the Postmodern Essay Generator.



For more background information check out the following links:

The Sokal Affair (aka the Social Text Affair) (Wikipedia article)
Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity (Sokal's original parody)
Transgressing the Boundaries: An Afterword (Sokal's explanation for his hoax once the satirical nature of his published article was discovered by the editors of the journal Social Text)

any subject has its jargon - and so has every scientific community. Not every written piece is meant to be public territory. A wise guy once remarked to me: humans use language just like dogs use their urine.

Quote:

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>>>... A wise guy once remarked to me: humans use language just like dogs use their urine.

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Hmmm. A little graphic, but true.