Robert Pondisco of the American Enterprise Institute responded to a query on Twitter/X yesterday on the question of why academic writing is so awful. His pithy answer:
The opacity of academic prose arises from the epistemological imperative to operationalize disciplinary jargon, facilitating intra-specialized discourse while obfuscating heterogenous interpretive accessibility and perpetuating a recursive dialectic of erudition and exclusion.
Yup, that pretty much nails it.
My young philosopher pal Spencer Case got the wise idea in his head to ask ChatGPT to render the Gettysburg Address as written by postmodern/radical feminist icon Judith Butler, and this is the result:
In a performative act of memorialization, we gather here to invoke the memory of a conflict that, through the violent demarcations of power and sovereignty, has sought to reconstitute the fragile architecture of a nation founded on the equivocal premise of freedom and equality. The battlefield upon which we stand—this material site—serves as both a testament to the entangled lives that have been lost and as a symbolic space where the performative nature of nationhood is both affirmed and contested.
The lives that were sacrificed here exceed the normative frameworks of historical narration; they resist full recuperation into the discourse of nation-building because they reveal the precarity that undergirds any national project premised on exclusions and hierarchies. These bodies, rendered vulnerable by the mechanisms of state power, demonstrate that the so-called “union” is not a fixed entity, but one continually (re)produced through the discursive operations of war, sacrifice, and memory.We cannot, within the confines of this performative occasion, fully “dedicate” or “consecrate” this ground, for to do so would be to presume a mastery over the lives and losses that have taken place here—a mastery that remains necessarily incomplete. The very notion of consecration implies an authority that we, as subjects situated within the ideological apparatuses of power, can never fully possess. Instead, it is the act of remembrance itself, enacted collectively and iteratively, that calls into question the viability of the structures of governance and identity that led to this war.And yet, we remain beholden to the ongoing project of democracy—not as a static ideal, but as a performative act that must constantly be re-negotiated in light of the ever-present threat of violence and erasure. The task ahead is not merely to affirm the survival of a nation, but to interrogate the conditions of possibility under which such a nation might persist without replicating the very exclusions and inequalities that precipitated its own crisis. Thus, the struggle for democracy is, at its core, a struggle against the normalization of violence and the naturalization of oppression.
In this moment of collective address, let us not merely honor the dead, but let us commit ourselves to the perpetual critique of the very structures that render lives precarious and disposable, with the understanding that such a critique is the only path toward a more just and livable future.
I think this is actually much more lucid than the bulk of Butler’s so-called writing. As Spencer comments, “AI technology is going to have to be much more advanced to produce prose as ghastly as Judith Butler’s.” But as we know these AI bots tend to lean left.
At least this not the Gettysburg Address as done on Power Point.
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