Utterly beyond their intellectual power.

I recently read David Berlinski’s brilliant little book A Tour of the Calculus. In it, he observed about the medieval Hindu mathematician Bhāskara:

[he] demonstrated correctly that the square root of three plus the square root of twelve equals three times the square root of three, an achievement, I might add, utterly beyond the collective intellectual power, say, of the English department at Duke University.  (It is pleasing to imagine members of the department sitting together in a long lecture hall, Marxists to one side, deconstructionists to the other, abusing one another roundly as they grapple with the problem.)

That problem, I must admit, took me two tries and three minutes to solve, but then again, I majored in history and went to law school.  So I can see how an English professor would be at sea with it.  I’ll explain how it’s done at the end of this post.

It’s becoming increasingly obvious that majoring in English or some other humanities subject (to say nothing about those stupid “oppression studies” majors) is a complete waste of time and money.  All the astute reader has to do is read a bit of the journals that print “research” in these subjects to know that these subjects are nothing but chicanery hiding behind impenetrable jargon.  The superstars in these subjects are the worst offenders.  It’s tough not to laugh at people who call academic luminary Judith Butler “one of the ten smartest people on the planet.”

Why?  Because Judith Butler inspired one of my favorite moments in Bias Incident: The World’s Most Politically Incorrect Novel, the moment when Jeff Jackson reads a bit of his professor’s writing.  The professor’s jargon ridden prose was based on an actual prize-winning sentence from the work of Prof. Butler.  That prize is one given for bad academic writing.  The late, great Denis Dutton had this to say about Butler and her writing:

Judith Butler, a Guggenheim Fellowship-winning professor of rhetoric and comparative literature at the University of California at Berkeley, admired as perhaps “one of the ten smartest people on the planet,” wrote the sentence that captured the contest’s first prize. Homi K. Bhabha, a leading voice in the fashionable academic field of postcolonial studies, produced the second-prize winner.

“As usual,” commented Denis Dutton, editor of Philosophy and Literature, “this year’s winners were produced by well-known, highly-paid experts who have no doubt labored for years to write like this. That these scholars must know what they are doing is indicated by the fact that the winning entries were all published by distinguished presses and academic journals.”

Professor Butler’s first-prize sentence appears in “Further Reflections on the Conversations of Our Time,” an article in the scholarly journal Diacritics (1997):

The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.

Dutton commented elsewhere about this sentence:  “To ask what this means is to miss the point. This sentence beats readers into submission and instructs them that they are in the presence of a great and deep mind. Actual communication has nothing to do with it.”

I wonder if Butler is capable of demonstrating what that medieval Hindu mathematician was capable of demonstrating: that the square root of three plus the square root of twelve equals three times the square root of three.  I’ll show you how to do it myself.  Here goes: (you can stop reading now if you have no interest in math).  The square root of twelve can be broken down into the square root of four times the square root of three.  Now, the square root of four is the number two, so we’re left with two times the square root of three.  Add to that the square root of three and you have three times the square root of three.  Presto.  And I did it without even having to mention “Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects.”