Another voice in the fray,
 
I respectfully respond to Malcolm Dean:
 
> I respectfully differ ... on all counts. The world IS a simple
> place, but clearly our understanding of it is not, hence the
> smokescreen of jargon, especially in the humanities.
> Marxism/Leninism DID collapse, and if academics do not clearly
> comprehend the magnitude of that mass shift away from jargon
> (i.e. b.s.), THAT is a sad mistake on their part.
 
I love the appeal to "respect" at the start, followed by the
comment that what some people think is valid and interesting
is "b.s."  I guess spelling out "bull shit" is disrespectful.
But anyways....
 
About the plain ol' words you're using here.  What is this "world" to
which you refer?  The world of culture and cultural products (can
I say "texts" here?)?  Do you really propose that this world is
"simple," that it can be reduced to simple notions of cause and
effect, or scientific fact?  Are all readings, interpretationns,
representations of these texts similarly simple?
 
Another interesting term: "Marxism/Leninism."  To what does that
refer?  Political or social or economic systems?  The theoretical
conclusions readers draw from reading the work of those authors?
What connection is there between the political and social and
economic constructions of those theories that have surfaced over
the years and the cultural applications in diffent areas?  Should
a "collapse" (which I don't buy, by the way) in one area necessarily
mean that any and every interpretation of the material is therefore
false?  Sounds complicated to me....
 
> Neo-Marxist
> critical theory is rooted in the delusionary origins of that
> mistake, and has nothing concrete or practical to offer.  Film is
> not obscure, but semiotics is deliberately so.
 
What exactly do you mean by "Neo-Marxist"?  Do you mean the mass cultural
studies work of people working out of the E.P. Thompson and Raymond
Williams work of the 1950s and 1960s?  Or perhaps the cultural criticism
of Theodor Adorno and others in the Frankfurt School?  Or maybe Walter
Benjamin?  Or Frederick Jameson?  Or Terry Eagleton?  What issues do
you think "Neo-Marxists" get wrong?  What's at stake in their work
for you?  What is delusionary about it?  And what film are you talking
about that isn't deliberately obscure?  Obscure about what?  And what
connection is there between semiotics and this "Neo-Marxism"?
 
> Let's see some
> objective, apolitical research from this crowd, then perhaps we
> could all join in and jargon ourselves into collective silliness
> ... we still wouldn't be making great film ...
 
What fascinates me about that last bit is how it invokes its own jargon
(objective, apolitical, concrete, practical) and other terms based on
assumptions you make about the readers of this list.  For example, I could
care less about "making great film," whatever that might mean.
 
Let's face it: a term like "great" is just as complicated, conflicted, and
non-objective as any of the bits of "jargon" that you trot out.  But I'm
willing to accept your use of the term, in my own limited way, in order
to take a crack at some understanding of the rest of the posting.  You do
the same thing, using "jargon" like "semiotics" and "Neo-Marxism" to make
your point, as if we all have some understanding of what those words mean.
 
The final irony of this posting is that you invoke science as the place
where we can go for clarity.  As someone who has had stuff published in
scientific journals, I can say with confidence that science has it's
own problems with ill-defined terms.
 
Speaking for myself as a cultural critic, I'm not interested in obfuscation
for its own sake.  However, I cann't accept that there clarity is
such an easy thing, and I'm quite convinced that clarity is often not
where people think it is -- that, in fact, those places are usually most
obscure.
 
At any rate, I shudder to think that the people on this list are
interested in eliminating certain ways fo talking and writing about
film and tv and teaching.  That kind of maneuver is bad news, if you
ask me.
 
Thanks for reading my whole posting, whoever you are.
 
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