The Dictionary of Fashionable Nonsense by Ophelia Benson and Jeremy Stangroom

I became quite depressed while taking my MPhil in Archaeology. I was being taught philosophy. By archaeologists. I’m not an expert on Philosophy but I’m willing to bet that with three years for a BA, and another 3+1 for the MA and PhD, there’s a bit more to Philosophy than using long words. Sorry, deploying extensive lexical structures within a textual context. I also suspect that a background in Philosophy would help in teaching it, but I’m open to being corrected by those who know better. So I was taught about Foucault and Latour etc and I thought there was something wrong. Reading Sokal and Bricmont’s Intellectual Impostures and Levitt and Gross’s Higher Superstition didn’t help, because it became evident that at least some of the Faculty were living their lives in a special place.

The Dictionary of Fashionable Nonsense by Ophelia Benson and Jeremy Stangroom would probably have caused me pack it all in and become a monk. If I could find an atheist monastery. It’s a collection of about 500 (as Ophelia has kindly told me) entries on… well I can’t call it philosophy. Fashionable Nonsense is the best description for it. You can see examples of it on the Butterflies and Wheels website.

It’s not that it skewers a clique I find offensive that makes me like this book. There are lots of people willing to criticise post-modernism especially among people who haven’t read the original texts. A lot of ‘criticisms’ are knee-jerk anti-intellectualism. The difference is that Benson and Stangroom have read what is being said and understand it. Which is more than the authors of post-modern articles do. Except as Benson and Stangroom point out, authors don’t really exist.

Acclaim has not been universal. There’s a terrible review on Amazon UK. Ryan argues that the book is “Another trite and innocently framed attack on those intellectuals who are trying to decenter the–and here is a phrase they make fun of–dominant hegemonic discourse, that is so corrosive and debilitating [sic] to our civilization.” How is the creation of a social clique occupying the same dark corner of thoughtspace going to ‘decenter’ the reality-based community? What moral authority exists to justify such action? Where’s the evidence for the assertion?

Ok, I admit I went too far with the last question.

The great strength of the book is that it starkly illustrates that so much of a movement that proclaims itself as a great liberator of thought is fuelled on a celebration of ignorance (See Andrew Ross on this page). This is done at it’s best when they tackle topics like “e=mc²: Probably a sexed equation…” and name names. In this case Luce Irigaray. Some of the definitions pull the same joke like “Burgess: Famous snail…” though aren’t as helpful as it would be hard to explain the reference to a post-modernist.

I think I’ll find it useful and if I give a paper at the Theoretical Archaeology Group conference this year. I may well cite some of the definitions deadpan. They should pass through without firing a neuron of doubt in a section of the audience.

As for my MPhil exam, I found an archaeologist who trotted out the thing about the reader creating new texts whenever they read something. So I memorised the citation and when the inevitable question on epistemology came up I wrote “Potter (citation) has shown that in the act of reading, the reader creates a new text. I’ve looked carefully through this and I’m certain there are no errors in this, therefore any errors found must be ones created by the examiner in their interpretation of this. I should therefore receive a 100% mark because it’s not reasonable I should be marked down simply because of the examiner’s own mistakes.”

It’s not quite “Is this a question? Only if this is an answer” clever, but I was quite pleased with it. —–