I agree with you that academia is hard to get into regardless of education (it's basically entering decades old conversations and expecting to understand it immediately) but there are problems with how academia structures their writing that is purposefully wordy and convoluted.

ihaveabsolutelynoidea:

queercommunist:

biopowerviolence:

i mean for starters, academia is not just one person and one voice and one writing style- academic texts fill a range. i’m not really sure what exactly you mean by “purposefully wordy and convoluted”- is this in reference to the specific vocabulary used in areas of study? because then it’s not so much a matter of it being purposefully difficult but a matter of it using specific language for the field. 

like if i wrote a paper on brain surgery, i would be using specific vocab that people who know about brain surgery would understand because that’s the language the field of brain surgery uses to communicate thoughts and ideas. it’s really no different in philosophical texts or any other field of study. 

And honestly, I think what people tend to ignore is that, in many cases, these ideas become published by high-level academics and over the years those filter in undergraduate readings and syllabi and those undergrads share those ideas with totally unaffiliated friends. Ideas move and get shared, and that’s okay.

So much of the language you see on tumblr today (even if, as I’d say, it gets misused often) comes from academics. We got the word “hegemonic” from Raewyn Connell, an Australian trans woman who works in sociology and has worked in academia since the 1970s. We got the word “performativity” from Butler, who’s accused of being excessively hard to read- yet performativity is a pretty broadly understood concept. We got the word “intersectionality” from Kimberle Crenshaw, who is not always a particularly easy read. We got the solidification of the idea of “dialectics” from Hegel, who I often have to read many, many times over to fully understand. We got “misogynoir” from Moya Bailey, who I believe blogs on tumblr in addition to being a scholar with (I believe) a PhD. The understanding of feminism as a politic rather than a lifestyle choice was popularized (though not created) by bell hooks, who doesn’t always write in terribly accessible language. Like, we’ll get it anyway and these ideas filter around, rather than remaining static on a page. People talk and trade ideas.

The problem is the idea that words on a paper, rather than guiding us in understanding something, will spark sudden calls to action. I don’t think that if you just wrote The Communist Manifesto over today in more modern English than anyone with fluency in English could read, we would suddenly have a full communist revolution tomorrow. Just giving people exposure to an idea can change their worldview, and that’s important, but it doesn’t translate into revolutionary action. How many leftists do I know who circle jerk over dusty books and do nothing but talk about dead theory? A whole bunch. I also know many activists who’ve never read Marx, or Kropotkin, etc etc, who would be thrown off by the word “dialectics” but who are doing great work organizing workers on the ground in their own workplaces and across the country. So I think generally we need to move away from the idea everyone seems to HATE until it gets applied to people who work in academia- the idea that the working class must and will be led by a single revolutionary group. Anytime someone brings up unionism on this site, I see cries of the dreaded  V A N G A U R D I S M, but when academics don’t claim that their work is going to spark revolution the second it’s published, they’re awful people for not making work everyone can read. It isn’t intended to be read by everyone- it is intended to be read by people working specifically within a certain field and who are already comfortable with a certain vocabulary. That’s the entire basis of the peer-reviewed journal: your scholarly peers review your work, talk about it, and then pass it on to your other scholarly peers. What gets done with it is 1- not a concern for many academics who just love the work they do and 2- not up to that academic.

ilu