Comment by SummerlyMars | Hacker News Reader

Comment by SummerlyMars | Hacker News Reader

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It's still difficult to parse. If I replace the parts that I don't understand with variables, I get

> The move from a <FLOB> in which <FOO> is understood to structure <BAR> <similarly to BAZ> brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of <QUIN> that takes <QUUX> as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the <QUUZ> inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the <CORGE>.

Consider all the different ideas that are being referenced in just one sentence. There are only so many ideas I can hold in my mind at once, even if I'm familiar with them. Butler's ideas might be worth considering, or they might not, but writing like this is forcing a sort of labour upon the reader, regardless of whether they're familiar with the concepts used or not.

Check my interpretation above (I did 3 levels, expanded simplified, quite simplified, and explain-it-to-me-like-I'm-18).

It is indeed tedious writing, but her audience isn't the general public, is other academics and people who get off with this sort of think and have read 100+ other books on the same subjects.

So, it's more like Dijkstra writing something to Knuth (and laying the technical language thick to save time), more than an O'Reilly book or a Hacker Noon post.

Thank you for your translation. That helps to clear up the meaning, and was much clearer than the sentence in question. That said, I don't believe it invalidates my criticism, as it's not the technical language that I'm opposed to. Given your comment about it being tedious writing, I think we may actually be in agreement, and that I expressed myself poorly.

The point I was attempting to make was that even if you replace the variables with anything that results in an intelligible sentence, it's still going to be difficult to read. Regardless of whether you understand the terminology. The structure of the sentence itself is contributing to the difficulty in interpretation. Could time have been saved by writing it in this style? Sure, but it takes the readers' attention away from the actual argument and forces them to spend extra effort on interpreting the sentence structure.

I see this as a problem with academic (and even popular) writing in general. It's far from being exclusive to either Judith Butler or philosophy.

If you don't understand "capital", you're probably punching above your weight anyway.

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