Thinking About Teaching English Abroad?
posted by Winston Smith at
6:10 PM
Monday, March 17, 2014
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4 Comments:
It's funny, when you put it in an international context, how obviously dated is the SJW speak. "Imperialist language", "industrial complex"... Except for the innovation of privilege talk, this could have been written in 1975. This author, of course, will have learned these tropes in school, but from whom? Likely as not, the professor who passed on this way of thinking is the 2nd generation conceptualizing the world in terms expedient to Cold War politicians long dead. What accounts for the staying power of Leninist and Maoist ad hoc concepts 40 years after they were useful to those who coined them?
Interesting question, A...
But don't you already kind of answer it? They probably picked the language up from their professors.
The far left *does* love its pet locutions... Why they are so, so, so obsessed with language...well there's another question...
Sure, the university is the vector, but I was musing on the virulence of this jargon. Freudian psychology once had a similar power, and the jargon could not survive the death of the supporting theory. Nobody uses "superego" in anything but a casual way. But "critical" theory continues to provide dominant set of concepts for analyzing basically everything within large swaths of the humanities, long after the heart of Marxian theory has been cut out. For some reason, the critical theorist feels the need to refer to our present state of affairs as "late capitalism", though "late" makes no sense without a Hegelian theory of history and "capitalism" makes no sense without materialism. The appeal must be subjective.
Right, I see.
Well, this isn't much of an explanatory gain, but: though Marx is pretty much dead in econ, he lives on in (as Nagel puts it) the weaker regions of the humanities and social sciences. Freud is similar: psychology pretty much left him behind, but the same parts of the humanities and social sciences still revere him...
*Why* do they do so? Well, we're talking the more politicized parts of the academy, which means the leftier parts... The parts infected by all sorts of pseudointellectual nonsense...e.g. postmodernism and so on.
Has their bullshit immune system just been weakened somehow? Is it because they're lefties? Lefties do like their Marx... Though the PoMos specifically eschew that *type* of thing...so... The left seems to like non-rational explanations of human behavior...and that's something that both Freud and Marx emphasize...
Anyway..."they live on in the humanities" is something...but it does push the question back a step...
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