[Reader-list] Stupid Intellectual Fads.

[Nazneen Anand Shamsi]

Dear all,

Although I hate going through all those cut and paste jobs. But I guess now
that I want to share an essay with you all, I perhaps understand this urge
to just cut, paste and let roll.

Here's an article I read about stupid intellectual fads. How university
professors infect students with their gibberish about marx etc which in turn
results in years of theorizing, conferencing, journal publishing (many
friends, by the way mockingly argue that, journals articles are read just
two and a half people, the writer, the editor of the journal and that reader
who starts and leaves midway) and a yapping career marked up networking,
networking, networking with an occasional book or two thrown in and that
elusive tenure!

I loved this essay for its irreverence!

Hope you will enjoy it as much.

Warm regards

Nazo


The essay is called: Graphs on the death of Marxism, postmodernism, and
other stupid academic fads, I could not copy graphs because of formatting
issues on the readerlist. But please check them out at,

http://www.gnxp.com/blog/2008/09/graphs-on-death-of-marxism.php

******************************

http://www.gnxp.com/blog/2008/09/graphs-on-death-of-marxism.php

Graphs on the death of Marxism, postmodernism, and other stupid academic
fads

[*Note*: I'm rushing this out before the school week starts, as I need
sleep, so if it seems unedited, that's why.]

We are living in very exciting times -- at long last, we've broken the
stranglehold that a variety of silly Blank Slate theories have held on the
arts, humanities, and social sciences. To some, this may sound strange, but
things have decisively changed within the past 10 years, and these so-called
theories are now moribund. To let those out-of-the-loop in on the news, and
to quantify what insiders have already suspected, I've drawn graphs of the
rise and fall of these fashions.

I searched the archives of JSTOR, which houses a cornucopia of academic
journals, for certain keywords that appear in the full text of an article or
review (since sometimes the big ideas appear in books rather than journals).
This provides an estimate of how popular the idea is -- not only the true
believers, but their opponents too, will use the term. Once no one believes
it anymore, then the adherents, opponents, and neutral spectators will have
less occasion to use the term. I excluded data from 2003 onward because most
JSTOR journals don't deposit their articles in JSTOR until 3 to 5 years
after the original publication. Still, most of the declines are visible even
as of 2002.

Admittedly, a better estimate would be to measure the number of articles
with the term in a given year, divided by the total number of articles that
JSTOR has for that year, to yield a frequency. But I don't have the data on
total articles. However, on time-scales when we don't expect a huge change
in the total number of articles published -- say, over a few decades -- then
we can take the total to be approximately constant and use only the raw
counts of articles with the keyword. Crucially, although this may warp our
view of an increasing trend -- which could be due to more articles being
written in total, while the frequency of those of interest stays the same --
a sustained decline must be real.

Some thoughts:

First, there are two exceptions to the overall pattern of decline --
orientalism and post-colonialism. The former may be declining, but it's hard
to say one way or the other. The latter, though, was holding steady in 2002,
although its growth rate had clearly slowed down, so its demise seems to be
only a matter of time -- by 2010 at the latest, it should show a down-turn.

Second, aside from Marxism, which peaked in 1988, and social
constructionism, which declined starting in 2002 *, the others began to fall
from roughly 1993 to 1998. It is astonishing that such a narrow time frame
saw the fall of fashions that varied so much in when they were founded.
Marxism, psychoanalysis, and feminism are very old compared to
deconstruction or postmodernism, yet it was as though during the 1990s an
academia-wide clean-up swept away all the bullshit, no matter how long it
had been festering there.

If we wanted to model this, we would probably use an S-I-R type model for
the spread of infectious diseases. But we'd have to include an exogenous
shock sometime during the 1990s since it's unlikely that epidemics that had
begun 100 years apart would, of their own inner workings, decline at the
same time. It's as if we started to live in sparser population densities,
where diseases old and new could not spread so easily, or if we wandered
onto an antibiotic that cured of us diseases, some of which had plagued us
for much longer than others.

Third, notice how simple most of the curves look -- few show lots of noise,
or the presence of smaller-scale cycles. That's despite the vicissitudes of
politics, economics, and other social changes -- hardly any of it made an
impact on the world of ideas. I guess they don't call it the Ivory Tower for
nothing. About the only case you could make is for McCarthyism halting the
growth of Marxist ideas during most of the 1950s. The fall of the Berlin
Wall does not explain why Marxism declined then -- its growth rate was
already grinding to a halt for the previous decade, compared to its
explosion during the 1960s and '70s.

Still, it could be that there was a general anti-communist zeitgeist in the
1950s, so that academics would have cooled off to Marxism of their own
accord, not because they were afraid of McCarthy or whoever else.
Importantly, that's only one plausible link -- there are a billion others
that don't pan out, so it may be that our plausible link happened due to
chance: when you test 1000 correlations, 5 of them will be significant at
the 0.005 level, even though they're only the result of chance.

This suggests that a "great man theory" of intellectual history is wrong.
Surely someone needs to invent the theory, and it may be complex enough that
if that person hadn't existed, the theory wouldn't have existed (contra the
view that somebody or other would've invented Marxism). After that, though,
we write a system of differential equations to model the dynamics of the
classes of individuals involved -- perhaps just two, believers and
non-believers -- and these interactions between individuals are all that
matter. How many persuasive tracts were there against postmodernism or
Marxism, for example? And yet none of those convinced the believers since
the time wasn't right. Postmodernism was already growing at a slower rate in
1995 when the Sokal Affair put its silliness in the spotlight, and even then
its growth rate didn't decline even faster as a result. Kind of depressing
for iconoclasts -- but at least you can rest assured that at some point, the
fuckers will get theirs.

Fourth, the sudden decline of all the big-shot theories you'd study in a
literary theory or critical theory class is certainly behind the recent
angst of arts and humanities grad students. Without a big theory, you can't
pretend you have specialized training and shouldn't be treated as such --
high school English teachers may be fine with that, but if you're in grad
school, that's admitting you failed as an academic. You want a good
reputation. Isn't it strange, though, that no replacement theories have
filled the void? That's because everyone now understands that the whole
thing was a big joke, and aren't going to be suckered again anytime soon.
Now the generalizing and biological approaches to the humanities and social
sciences are dominant -- but that's for another post.

Also, as you sense all of the big theories are dying, you must realize that
you have no future: you'll be increasingly unable to publish articles -- or
have others cite you -- and even if you became a professor, you wouldn't be
able to recruit grad students into your pyramid scheme, or enroll students
in your classes, since their interest would be even lower than among current
students. Someone who knows more about intellectual history should compare
arts and humanities grad students today to the priestly caste that was
becoming obsolete as Europe became more rational and secular. I'm sure they
rationalized their angst as a spiritual or intellectual crisis, just like
today's grad students might say that they had an epiphany -- but in reality,
they're just recognizing how bleak their economic prospects are and are
opting for greener pastures.

Fifth and last, I don't know about the rest of you, but I find young people
today very refreshing. Let's look at 18 year-olds -- the impressionable
college freshmen, who could be infected by their dopey professors. If they
begin freshman year just 1 year after the theory's peak, the idea is still
very popular, so they'll get infected. If we allow, say 5 years of cooling
off and decay, professors won't talk about it so much, or will be use a less
strident tone of voice, so that only the students who were destined to latch
on to some stupid theory will get infected. Depending on the trend, this
makes the safe cohort born in 1975 at the oldest (for Marxism), or 1989 at
the youngest (for social constructionism). And obviously even among safe
cohorts, some are safer than others -- people my age (27) may not go in for
Marxism much, but have heard of it or taken it seriously at some point (even
if to argue against it intellectually). But 18 year-olds today weren't even
born when Marxism had already started to die.

It's easy to fossilize your picture of the world from your formative years
of 15 to 24, but things change. If you turned off the radio in the mid-late
'90s, you missed four years of great rock and rap music that came out from
2003 to 2006 (although now you can keep it off again). If you write off
dating a 21 year-old grad student on the assumption that they're mostly
angry feminist hags, you're missing out. And if you'd rather socialize with
people your own age because younger people are too immature to have an
intelligent discussion -- ask yourself when the last time was that you
didn't have to dance around all kinds of topics with Gen-X or Baby Boomer
peers because of the moronic beliefs they've been infected with since their
young adult years? Try talking to a college student about human evolution --
they're pretty open-minded. My almost-30 housemate, by comparison, was eager
to hear that what I'm studying would show that there's no master race after
all. What a loser.

* I started the graph of social constructionism at 1960, even though it
extends back to 1876, since it was always at a very low level before then
(less than 5 per year, often 0). Including these points didn't make the
recent decline so apparent in the graph, so out they went.