This guy has written a very long essay analyzing the 60s British TV show 'The Prisoner', the 80s Polish TV show 'Decalogue' and the 90s Japanese TV show 'Neon Genesis Evangelion'. There's a lot of interesting stuff there, although I do think he goes of the deep end fairly often, however I was struck by the difficulty of reading this lit-crit type stuff. For example:
The historical event functions, in essence, very much like Adorno’s notion of the constellation, effectively mediating between the objective set of social relations and symbolic capitals (what Bourdieu terms the field), and the subjective set of positions, position-taking and strategic maneuvers in that field (the Bourdieusian habitus).It does make more sense in context, but it seems to me that it could quite easily be rewritten in a much more accessible manner. Here's another one:
[...] video culture draws on a much larger library of mediatic narratives, which circulate across the length and breadth of the world-system.If the terms 'world-system' and 'mediatic narrative' don't make your inner hard science snob roll it's eyes, I don't know what will.
I've always thought that the humanities often get unfairly maligned by science and engineering types, but I think if they want to get more respect they should make an effort to talk like normal people.
My own snobbish theory is that other disciplines, including the humanities but the worst offender is definitely management, see that every scientific discipline has its own set of jargon and exotic words that renders it incomprehensible to the lay person, so they decided to make up their own in order to achieve the same aura of esoteric knowledge.
The difference is that obscure scientific terms are invented for things that there were genuinely no words for previously. 'Bosons', 'relativity' and even 'gravity' are all concepts that no existing term could describe when they were discovered. I don't think you can say the same for 'leveraging' or 'world-system'.
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