As for the “obfuscation” of ideas, some people just can’t write, or they assume readers are as totally familiar with X as they are. It happens less now than formerly: if you want an adventure, read some really old criticism, from the 50s, say. It’s terrible, mostly. The New Critics are often described as ignoring the biography of the poet — really, they just didn’t ever mention it in their writing because they assumed everyone knew the biography as well as they did. : p

So, what you were saying in your postscript was more along the lines of someone responding to “hard work” with a simple “negative quip”, or was it anger at the more general disdain for academics that many people display? For the former, hard work does not always equate good work, and sometimes the short and flagrant response is about all that’s truly warranted (that sounds mean, but reality is often cruel). For the latter, I personally can understand the majority’s frustration with certain academics, though writing off all academics is a bit too much.

@jp: Well, you’re right, but modified Freudianism is perfectly acceptable in Japanese studies — that is, in so far as you can assume that Japanese people have unconsciousnesses (however you want to define that), and that you can assume Japanese people have sex. So it depends on how it’s applied. (Oh, also, late thought: post-WWII Japan is likely just as Freudian as anything else, as they absorbed the concepts along with the adaptation of western media we know happened, as that’s where anime comes from).

And my impression is that the Napier thing is about audience construction, and Napier’s audience is necessarily western anyway, so even unaltered Freud would be acceptable in that case. Not that I think the actual claim is right — but it’s Napier’s to make.

And you’re certainly right that both sides see the bad things and assume the whole [other side's pursuit] is worthless.

@MLHP: You do have a point, but I feel that — as I said to GL — canons are too restrictive and prescriptive. So I think the benefits are outweighed by the dangers. But that’s the ideal version of how a canon is supposed to work, certainly. But then, if that’s the case, why have some schools of thought (literature mostly, though film critics are beginning to do this I think) refused to add anything to the canon after the 50s-60s (British and American, that is)? Theory has the benefit of training one to lay out the parts of a thing and then figure out how meaning works — in whichever way one chooses. Just because someone reads Freud, they’re not honor-bound to do Freudian readings forever — indeed, if that happened, people would lose interest pretty quickly. A good reading is always grounded in the text — that’s another misconception, that theory encourages a person to ignore the text. If one does that and submits it to a journal, for instance, one’s just going to get rejected. There’s theory out there that’s not about texts, but it doesn’t purport to be readings of things.

Also, you have a point in the fissure in criticism, but that wasn’t actually what I meant. Let me try to clarify: I was complaining more about serious fans who talk disparagingly about the conclusions of academics, speaking as though the academic must just be making things up to get noticed. Does that happen? Probably. But most often an academic is just a fan with some very specific training — some of it bad, just as some super-fan training is bad — relating what he or she thought of when he or she read/watched/listened to something.

Moving onto your postscript, (it seems to me that) you’re drawing on a fissure in criticism on whether the author or the reader is the key interpreter in a work’s meaning. This is a bit hard for me to comment on seeing as I’m not sure what you’re referencing with Akira here (nor do I wish to look it up). But if you put the meaning in the author’s hands, then these (for lack of a better word) extra-curricular readings are wrong. If instead you put the meaning into the reader’s hand, then this reader here is more than allowed to dispute whatever any other reader wants to put into the work.

#1 matters more than I originally thought, now that I think about it. I feel like if someone is going to do such an apples-to-oranges analysis as that, it shows to me some degree of some combination of lack of awareness regarding the theory itself, the culture the theory is generated from, the work the theory is being applied to, the culture the work arose out of, and the writer’s own self-awareness. Due to this unease, it becomes harder for the reader to give the writer the benefit of the doubt that they know what they are talking about when they are reading something about a topic that they themselves might understand only at best tangentially.

Interestingly, this unease showed up on both sides on during a discussion on the amrc-l listserv regarding Mechademia, where fans reading the journal would see these little loose ends in the essays that were published, while the editors would see these little loose ends in works submitted by non-academics, causing both to conclude that neither side understands what they are talking about.

(tl;dr, Sokal Affair)

1) It’s Freud being applied in a non-Western context
2) It’s Freud being applied in film theory

#1 shouldn’t need any explanation, but #2 probably does. The short explanation is that film theory spent decades with Freud and it lead to nothing but really terrible theory that was on its face ludicrous and false (GIGO, etc.) but would keep getting spun and manipulated and drawn out a little bit more to try to make it work despite what one’s lying eyes were telling you, like that it was psychologically impossible for women to like movies.

But there doesn’t seem to be enough criticalness about theory itself to separate the gobbledeegook from any kind of useful modes of thinking.

I sometimes think that Canons are useful in that they inspire discussion — at what should and shouldn’t be there, when to change it, etc. In the mean time there is a dialectic of privileged and marginalized that makes for stirring drama (to me anyway).

Also, human achievement needs to be measured. The method and process for which needs to be every improving, is what I think.

And you’re probably right about the laziness factor as well. But there are some decent souls out there who are really working at what they’re doing, even if it’s a blog they don’t get any money for, and still they recoil from theory. So maybe it’s also that there’s work of a particular kind, that people believe is hard to get into? Which is also what you said, so I guess I just rephrased it? Hey, I’m tired, give me a break. : D