Miguel Sanchez has an entertaining couple of posts up at Modern Kicks on an MIT conference called "Regarding Evil" and laments the excesses of High Theory:
Far more bothersome is the sense one gets from the materials that at least some of those involved find the topic of evil to be just another topos to be exploited or toyed with rather than the profound subject that it is.
Indeed. But I think there’s another problem. Let’s start with Ronald Jones’ "Let’s Misbehave" presentation. The smart money says that when he says "misbehave" Mr. Jones doesn’t actually refer to things he finds immoral. Nor do I suspect he himself is an amoral guy (it’s possible, I admit). The conference doesn’t want us to do truly evil things like murder or torture or molest children. What that panel, the whole conference, says to me is "We find X constricted version of morality, the kind based on stricture from religion and tradition, to be bunk. We actually subscribe to a looser, modern morality Y." Only to say so sounds boring and unsophisticated, so the panel opts instead for Nietzschean turn-of-phrase and old-fashioned Ã(c)pater la bourgeoisie.
What gets lost in all this Not Saying What One Means is linguistic and conceptual clarity. Theory is at its finest when it allows us to reflect on the limits of knowledge, of language, of method and to use this insight in production of knowledge. Since this is often a difficult thing to do, and since I’m not the best at doing it, I tend to give the benefit of the doubt to scholars who try. But I draw the line when I suspect someone is trying to resurrect a new metaphysics, of sublimating a willful confusion of terms into the next Concept. A number of us in the humanities could use a good dose of Wittgenstein right now.
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