Those were the words spoken by a former colleague of mine about 10 years ago in the Film Studies graduate program at the University of Iowa in defense of academic jargon and the opacity of academic writing.
It was after that that my interest in academic discourse began to diminish. I had always enjoyed trying to parse out exactly what Judith Butler was trying to say, or nail down Fredrick Jameson on some point — usually to debunk and disprove them. But my colleague’s comments forced me to realize that academics not only had little regard or respect for non-academics (which was self-evident) but also they they lacked it for themselves. What my colleague was expressing was his own fear that he would “taken in” by a clearly written and well-argued text — that he and other academics were no match for the lucid and uncomplicated. They, too, like the Great Unwashed, were passive receptacles into which clear, easy discourse would flow uninhibited by critical faculties and warp their minds to the mainstream/patriarchal/heterosexual/capitalist order of things.
What made me think about this incident was Jim Holt’s recent article in The New Yorker on several works published on the topic of “bullshit.” I wish that bullshit studies had been so advanced when I was in graduate school; I could have avoided a lot of debt and recognized bullshit a lot earlier in my academic career if it had been.
The bestselling On Bullshit by Harry G. Frankfurt (which rests, unread, on my night table) distinguishes “bullshit” from “lies” based on the speaker’s regard for the truth. “The bullshitter,” he writes, “is faking things. But this does not mean that he necessarily gets them wrong.” Holt further explains that
the liar and the truthteller are on opposite sides of the same game, a game defined by the authority of truth. The bullshitter opts out this game altogether. Unlike the liar and the truthteller, he is not guided in what he says by his beliefs about the way things are.
Frankfurt does not get into academic bullshit, however, which is the kind defended by my clarity-loathing former colleague. Holt’s article cites another work, however, entitled “Deeper into Bullshit,” by G. Amy Cohen, which does explore the nature of academic bullshit. He writes that bullshit in the academy arises from an indifference to meaning, not to truth.
I have to disagree with the definition of bullshit, however. The distinction between bullshit and lies comes not from a relationship to truth (or meaning) but from an attitude toward the evidence that is employed to prove or disprove something.
Under this formulation, the distinction between bullshitters and liars is less clear, or maybe it’s just situational. The liar can be said to meet the truthteller on the same grounds with the same standards of evidence. He may tell his wife: “I wasn’t at the motel with my mistress last night,” when, in fact, he was. His wife produces photographs of him entering the motel room with his mistress at 3:00am. The lie is exposed only if both parties agree on the nature of the evidence. The liar was hoping the evidence didn’t exist, but it did, and he regards himself as caught. The bullshitter on the other hand will attempt to change the nature of the standard. He might claim, for example, that the evidence is invalid because photographs can be doctored, the timestamp can be manipulated, the photos “don’t prove anything,” etc. Or, he might try to shift the argument away from the evidence and claim that he was justified in his dalliance, “didn’t do anything wrong,” or the like. Both the liar and the bullshitter agree that evidence is required to make a truth claim; they simply disagree on how much evidence is needed or what the nature of the evidence has to be.
This is a subtle distinction, but critical, I think, because it reveals that “truth” (or “meaning”) for both liars and bullshitters is the same, whereas under Frankfurt’s definition, there remains this concept of a fundamental truth that liars believe in whereas bullshitters don’t. Under his formulation, the bullshitter is more dangerous because he disregards the truth/lie paradigm. Under my formulation, the truth/lie paradigm is not absolute for either liar or bullshitter. The only reason the bullshitter is more dangerous is that a skilled bullshitter can undermine the validity of evidence.
